New England.com, the online companion of the historic Yankee Magazine, was in need of a brand and technology evolution for their website. The goal was to update the branding, brand voice and evolve the logo, and then begin to re-envision how the online magazine could evolve as a platform for the next evolution of the online magazine.
Yankee has an extensive history and is an iconic American magazine. During the years the logo went through many small adjustments as it was translated from a hand drawn logo, to a hot metal version and then being translated to the digital screen. The first challenge was to research the logo origins across all of the historic uses and placements, from the first magazine issues, to the special editions and advertisements.
We interviewed the entire Yankee team to gather insights into what the brand of Yankee meant to each and every one at the company, while we researched the historical versions of the Yankee logo and branding across decades of publications.
The website was not aligned with the brand findings that we discovered through our interviews, and was not organized in a way that reflected the company’s goals. We created a new user experience plan and began to align the existing content to that plan. The changes would require extensive focus on maintaining the user traffic to the site, and retaining the SEO value of the existing website.
