My official position in Rebel News was editor, but in a startup everyone has to wear a lot of hats, and one of mine was “the entire graphics department.” The online paper focused heavily on activism, technology, and the intersection of the two, with frequent diversions into national and international stories relevant to social justice causes.
The Logo
How do you convey “professional” and “rebellious” in one image? This was one of the greatest creative challenges of the entire project. After many iterations I narrowed down the essence of what we needed, the correct shade of red for “firey and independent” with out accidentally conveying “communist,” the right level of messiness in the contrast font, using the clean font for the word “rebel” to contrast the ideas.
The Banner Images
This was my favorite part of the job. Every article needed a unique banner image for the website, that would be displayed on facebook and other social media sites when articles were shared. We had an ideological affinity for Creative Commons (and a shoestring budget), so the majority of our banners utilized CC licensed photographs and graphics to communicate the theme of the article. While it was sometimes possible to find a single image that worked without alteration, usually I would end up mashing together two or more to get there, sometimes playing with colors and other effects to set our version of these images apart visually.