Here is a sneak preview of our new logo, which will be officially inaugurated when we relaunch dezeen with a completely new design later this month.
The logo and corresponding brand identity has been developed by art director and designer Micha Weidmann, who has previously worked on redesigns for Time Out magazine and Le Temps newspaper and has worked on advertising and branding for organisations including Tate Modern, David Chipperfield Architects, Swarovksi and Fashion Week Barcelona.
The dezeen site is simultaneously being redesigned (not that it was ever designed in the first place...) and restructured by Weidmann working in conjunction with digital design consultancy designjunction, who worked with us earlier this year on the Zaha Hadid Blog.
Our fiendish brief to Weidmann was to create an identity that was as simple as possible, emphasising the ease-of-navigation and clarity of information that has made dezeen so successful, while simultaneously being stylish enough for our extremely discerning and design-savvy readers.
Weidmann's response is a purely typographic design using the Akzidenz Grotesque font, which originally dates back to 1896 and which is a precursor to classic sans-serif fonts such as Helvetica and Univers. Akzidenz Grotesque has very circular letterforms - particularly the lowercase "e", which helps when writing the e-heavy word "dezeen".
Weidmann has also split the word "dezeen" in two, partly to emphasise the fact that it is a corrupted compound of "design" and "magazine" (something many people don't realise) and partly because, apparently, people have started to call dezeen "the zeen" (thanks to Neil at Camron for starting this!).
(On top of this, dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs has long harboured the secret fantasy of inventing a mystery Dutch benefactor called Florian de Zeen, after whom the site could have been named.)
The resulting logo is both memorable and very simple, we think, and will also work when we start to expand dezeen into new areas. We hope you like it as much as we do!