The Kyoorius Awards are one of India’s most prestigious—organised annually in collaboration with the One Club of Creativity. Like every edition, 2019 also included the Kyoorius Young Blood Awards, open only to creatives under 28. Four briefs from four real-world clients were issued.
My friend Yash and I teamed up, and we were lucky to win the 2019 Red Elephant for our work on a rebrand for Dailyhunt—India’s leading news aggregator.
Every day for a decade now, Dailyhunt has been bringing global news in vernacular language to millions of readers. And it’s not just news they’re bringing: there’s also the latest in culture, trends, memes, opinions, and more.
This focus on new-age, localized content is especially relevant for people living far away from the major cities, who aren’t very fluent in English and/or Hindi. The barriers of logistics and linguistics removed, they’re now better aware about and more connected to the world around them.
News has changed, and it has changed the people reading it. Urban and rural India are finally on the same page—only the language’s different.
From this we derived our overall brand motto of News Evolves.
Our identity for Dailyhunt is based on two pillars: their News++ proposition, and their quest to bridge the gap between urban and rural India. Both these threads are distilled in our brand motto of News Evolves.
First, the logomark’s distinct shape represents the combined scope of news and content ‘formats’. Once, news was the width of the broadsheet and the length of the broadcast: today it is the smartphone-friendly size of video, memes, tweet, Stories, bulletin, and whatever format may come next. This transient nature is reflected in the open ends; the brand rests inside as the hub for everything from across the spectrum.
The second tenet is echoed in the two skewed lines. They converge gently towards an invisible end point to the viewer’s right, and signify the two realms that Dailyhunt connects: the global and the local, which, for the average Indian reader, had always run parallel.
Accommodating 14 vernacular languages required a system both neutral and flexible. We went minimal to ensure that content isn’t compromised, using only stark black-and-white as our main palette. The accent colour of choice—Stamp Green—was chosen for its dual ability to provide energy or emphasis, as needed. Finally, the identity system refrains from any overt representations of ‘Indian’ aesthetic: this is done in interest of fairness, so that no one culture or style becomes the de-facto representative.
After all, there is nothing more Indian than democracy by design.
Recognition: Red Elephant, Kyoorius Young Blood Award Winner, 2019