News platform and brand identity for UnHerd — a media startup founded to challenge received opinion across the political spectrum.
Confederation Studio was commissioned to create the news platform and brand identity for UnHerd, a media startup with a clear editorial mission: to surface and challenge the opinions that dominate public discourse. The brief covered brand identity, UX research, information architecture, prototyping, and a full UI component library — from first principles to launch.
Going against the herd
To express UnHerd’s irreverent approach to journalism, the visual identity deliberately subverted the established iconography of Fleet Street. Working with political illustrator Ben Jennings, the brand was built around a rearing cow — an awkward, wilful animal that refuses to follow the herd. The identity carried that spirit across every touchpoint: masthead, out-of-home, editorial illustration, and UI.
How do people consume news?
Before any wireframe was drawn, the team undertook research to understand how the target audience actually consumed news. Three distinct personas emerged — each with different habits, contexts, and expectations — and these became the primary design framework for every subsequent decision: the Politico, who navigates via social feeds and has highly specific interests; the Newsaholic, who reads for analysis and depth; and the Grazer, who browses broadly across multiple sites on mobile.
Behaviours vs. site mapping
The site architecture was built directly from persona behaviour rather than conventional news site conventions. The Grazer needed a content-dense homepage for commute browsing. The Politico needed deep archive cataloguing by topic, contributor, and theme. The Newsaholic needed long-form content re-packaged across formats — podcasts, personality-led columns, social channels. Each navigation decision was traceable back to a specific user need.
Bare-bones prototyping
With the information architecture settled, a bare-bones prototype was built and tested across multiple sprints with both the client and a dedicated testing group. The goal was to stress-test the persona-driven structure before any visual design was applied — validating that the architecture worked in practice before investing in the full build.
User interface palette
In parallel with the UX work, the brand identity was extended into a comprehensive UI component library — covering typography, colour, iconography, interaction states, and data visualisation. The library gave UnHerd’s internal team a complete system to build and iterate from after handover.
The platform
The launched platform delivered against all three personas. A content-dense homepage served daily commute browsing. Horizontally navigated deep dives — curated collections around specific subjects or editorial themes — gave focused readers a way into the archive. Interrupt modules throughout the reading experience surfaced related content and pulled readers further into the site. UnHerd launched and has continued to grow as one of the UK’s most distinctive political opinion platforms.
