Sahan Journal

PROJECT DETAILS

Mukhtar M. Ibrahim founded Sahan Journal in 2019 as the only Minnesota nonprofit newsroom dedicated to providing reliable, high-quality journalism for immigrants and communities of color. Now, as executive director, Mukhtar leads a growing 19-person newsroom. Today, Sahan’s dedicated journalists produce distinctive coverage of democracy, immigration, housing, work, education equity, climate justice, health care, and more. Entering a new stage of growth, and becoming a more established organization they wanted to reimagine their brand and website.

We created a new S monogram symbol to simplify their lead identity element. For the wordmark, we used a customized treatment of Manuka from Klim Type Foundry. Manuka acts as the primary expression typeface and its condensed rounded forms provide the basis for a graphic design language. Nick Sherman's HEX Franklin, an homage to Franklin Gothic, is used as the primary utility typeface. Klim's Tiempos Text is also used as a supportive serif typeface.

COLOR PALETTE

Building off the equity of the previous primary colors of red, white, and black we tweaked the Sahan Red color to have more energy and vibrancy. The biggest shift in color was the addition of expression colors. The colors add necessary flexibility when covering a diverse amount of subjects across a variety of media touch points.

DESIGN LANGUAGE

Beyond creating the core identity elements, we create a new design language to support the many applications and variety of content produced by Sahan Journal. Shapes that are derivative from the wordmark act as framing devices to photography. Textured photography is used to help aid with photography needs and add style. The rough paper textures are a nod to newspapers and flyers representative of getting the word out. Iconography is stylized to have textured edges to match other visual elements of the brand.