Identity For "Supernova" Media Company

This research project's goal was to create a worthy successor for the 'Novaya Gazeta' newspaper, but aimed at a young, progressive audience of creative class, aged between 18 to 32. This new media should talk with the uncompromising voice of the 'Novaya Gazeta', but focus its stories on the pressing problems of modern society in the age of post-anthropocene and surveillance capitalism. The core subjects for this new media, thus, should become mass surveillance, digital security, ecology of the media space, artificial intelligence and machine learning, augmented reality, space exploration and industrialization, telecommunications, post-colonialism, research, speculative theory of the future, mass culture in the era of emotional capitalism, big data collection, the future of art, participatory culture and others. In addition to an editorial platform for text, video, live broadcast, mobile applications, podcasts and a modular email subscriptions system, the 'supernova' is to become a design bureau and a consulting agency, prepared to develop solutions for the changing media production and media consumption market. In addition to a strong digital presence, the creators of the 'supernova' see their task in forming a community of people who are trying to look into tomorrow and speak the language of the future. Elements of the community building should be exclusive drops of merchandise for subscribers, a music and art of the future festival, lectures and workshops featuring invited experts, limited-run educational programs. This research was tasked with developing an identity based on technological and scientific aesthetics, but considered through humanitarian and social lenses. Tonally, it should refer to the atmosphere of scientific research and digital breakthroughs of recent years, but to be not fully decipherable, leaving a sense of mystery and perhaps metaphysical and existential liminality. Are.na, W1D1, Co-star, and LOT2046 became primary tonal references. It was also necessary to develop concepts for media's digital presence: a website, an application, a brand presence in social networks. To explore new ways to consume and navigate media content in accordance with the paradigms of the near future. Developing concepts for physical brand media such as merchandise, posters, and print products also became the focus of this work. Finally, we tried to create prototypes for 'supernova' public events identity, and the way to integrate it into the corporate branding of other companies for collaborative projects. One of the conclusions of the project was the realisation that the basis of corporate branding should not be a fixed identity, but a dynamically changing style based on a legible metaphor. For this purpose, we turned to the concept of user generated branding and began experimenting with ways to recreate the basic brand mark with the means available to the average Internet user. It was a compelling experiment, showing that figurative forms can be achieved through typographic elements containing a deeper metaphor underlying the brand ideology. It was also possible to define the way the user interacts with the site as continuous canvas, in which content is located in a plane of nonlinear space-time, and where the location itself is either generated autonomously or based on an editorial decision. By considering progressive media design concepts from the past, present and near future, we can better understand how our media consumption rituals are changing, and how we can qualitatively reshape the communication between people and the world around them. This hypothesis became the basis of the visual research project 'Speculative Media Design', which became the part of this thesis research.