Bihus
project website
visual identity
The client wanted a visual identity that would be new and fresh and yet in line with the existing one. Bihus was already an established, branded project at the time, so the transition had to be smooth. The identity also had to unify all the projects under the Bihus umbrella in a compelling and clear way.
In order to achieve this, we created a simple, recognizable logo system that could be easily adapted for all the online and offline projects and formats, including video, social media, print and merch.
LOGO VARIATIONS
We then produced the different variations of the logo, for all the individual Bihus projects and formats.
Even though the result looks simple and elegant, we did a lot of work and produced 4 preliminary concepts to get to the final version that really worked. After trying a bunch of different fonts to create some stylistic separation between the projects, we decided to use a single font.
Then there was the colour-coding, and here’s how that worked. The “serious” categories — news and projects — had their own coloured icon that was shown on black background in the page header. You can see those in the left two columns below.
The third column is the databases. These icons are transparent and have simple, thin outlines, and are shown on white background to give a more formal feel.
Then there were the remaining, fun projects, which also had their “official” icon, but in the context of the website it was just a black Ukrainian letter “B” on a coloured background.
Bihus.info
Bihus.info is run by a team of journalists, lawyers and activists to effect change in Ukrainian politics and life. They conduct journalist investigations to expose corruption in the country, create databases for accountability of those in power, and create lots of great video content.
Bihus.mobile
A large part of readers use their smartphones to consume the content on Bihus. So we paid special attention to the mobile version, making sure the navigation is clear and logical, and that everything works smoothly and perfectly on all devices.
Bihus ring
Bihus Ring is an open, searchable database of government registries, which allows journalists and ordinary citizens to check in on what’s going on with government spending and much more. Needless to say, much of this information is very hard to search for or find elsewhere, even though it should be openly availably in theory.
Bihus declarations
Government officials’ financial declarations are supposed to be in open access, but the convoluted system makes them hard to search and make sense of. Bihus.declarations aggregates this information in a convenient way, which made it possible for other journalists to conduct their research more efficiently.
They are professional, responsive, and flexible. We have been working together for over a year, and over the course of the collaboration, I saw nothing but professionalism, creativity, solid dev skills, and desire to go out of their way to make the projects work.
Project team
Branding: Michael Babenko
Design: Daria Maksimova, Vicky Hladinets, Alex Kuzminskyi
Dev: Alexey Kalyuzhnyi, Victor Kolesnik, Dmirty Olefir
PM: Nikita Derevianchenko