In redesigning the Mic brand, we avoided anything gimmicky or overtly stylish— their audience was too media-savvy for that. Instead, the new Mic logotype and graphic system had to project their engaged, socially-conscious voice, and feel unpretentious, confident and most importantly: casually smart.

We mulled over the name a lot — “Mic,” an abbreviation (so Millennial) for ‘microphone.’ We kept coming back to the dot-pattern typically found on microphone icons. The dot also surfaced in the new verticals nomenclature — the sports vertical would be ‘Sports.Mic’, the music vertical would be ‘Music.Mic’ and so-on — and thus the dot became the primary visual element of the brand. The identity extends into dot-matrix typography, and takes on a tech-savvy feeling, something friendly and credible without being authoritative.

As a whole the new Mic identity is an interlocking system of parts — the main ‘Mic’ logo, the dot matrix-typography, the bold identifying verticals colors, all connected by the dot. The system gives the brand its real visual strength. All the parts of the identity — vertical pages, social media avatars, overall Mic logo—reinforce each other without over-repeating the same graphic mark. In this case, a strong identity is an elegant system of parts that plays out in different platforms, emphasizing Mic’s Millennial aptitude.