The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Human started from a simple premise: the best way to understand the world is through the people experiencing it. Interesting stories, told by the people who live them. As a new kind of factual storytelling brand from documentary studio Zandland, Human was created for the shift tthat journalism is still moving through, one where audiences no longer look only to institutions to tell them what is happening. News now reaches people through platforms, creators, documentaries, clips and conversations, and authority is no longer inherited from an institution but earned through access, honesty and the ability to make a complex issue understandable.
At the same time, the stories that matter most have become harder to explain. They are messy, emotional, political and deeply human – rarely reducible to a headline. Where traditional journalism often creates distance in the name of objectivity, Human sets out to close it, moving its audience nearer to the people living inside an issue rather than the sides arguing over it. Understanding over judgement. To turn that ambition into an identity, London-based design studio Office of Overview built a visual and verbal language designed to sit as close to real speech as Human’s films.
The route in was Jeffersonian transcription, a system used in conversation analysis to capture not just what people say but how they say it: the pauses, the overlaps, the hesitations, the emphasis, the moments where meaning appears in how something is spoken as much as in the words. “The idea is to document real human stories and emotion,” Design Director Avi Bamra explains, which made it “only right to visually champion that as honestly as possible by highlighting not just what people say but ‘how’ we speak.” “The Jeffersonian transcript devices were therefore used throughout the brand,” he adds, “in both our emotive tone of voice and in functional touchpoints.” So rather than polish every story into a clean institutional voice, the identity takes the texture of expression as its material, turning speech marks, pauses, interruptions, fragments and emphasis into visual devices.
“A major directive for us was ensuring the brand felt like a far cry from the cues of traditional journalism and documentary making,” Bamra notes. Because the series set out to tell boots-on-the-ground stories, Office of Overview drew a bold, punchy wordmark with the vernacular of grassroots fashion, music and art behind it – “a solid and unapologetic wordmark,” as he describes it, meant to stand for the people whose stories are being told. Set within it is the brand’s symbol, a human-shaped asterisk whose glyph hides a head and a pair of arms and legs, and which doubles as the Jeffersonian transcript symbol for rough and gritty intonation.
Next to the mark sits Displaay’s Saans typeface. “If we’re telling the honest stories of peculiar people and strange experiences, it felt only right to leverage a neutral sans serif typeface with some small moments of personality,” Bamra reveals, “a highly functional and clean typeface with a touch of personality.”
Against that restraint, colour supplies the energy. The palette grew out of an early strategic concept of telling ‘full spectrum stories,’ and it takes its cue from the ‘No Signal’ screens of old television. “We wanted to hero vibrant colours in the RGB colour spectrum alongside white and black overtones,” Bamra details, “bringing a punch of energy to branded layouts.”
Motion keeps the same honesty. It’s deliberately plain so the subjects always stay in front. “The people and places are the protagonists of the stories being told,” Bamra explains, “so having our motion make use of simple movement was really important.” Basic position changes, match-cuts and low frame rates keep the movement feeling impactful without letting it become the centre of attention. Alongside the identity sits the line ‘Global Stories. Human Scale.’ “Human stories resonate everywhere,” Bamra concludes, whether the subject is an unfamiliar subculture or one you already know.