A Collage Education

Established in 2014, Gimlet Media is a narrative podcasting company based in Brooklyn, NY. Its podcasts genres range from documentaries to scripted to history to journalism to culture while also working with brands like Adobe, Lyft, Mastercard, Nike, Reebok, and Squarespace through Gimlet Creative, the company’s branded podcast division. In February, Gimlet Media was acquired by Spotify and recently introduced a new identity — their logo was Spotted on June — designed by New York, NY-based Grand Army.

GrandArmy worked with Gimlet to establish a brand positioning, logo, and visual identity system, designed to weave together the full suite of Gimlet podcasts into one ever-expanding tapestry.

Grand Army project page

Built on a robust wordmark informed by letterpress broadsides and vintage newspaper headlines, the identity brings Gimlet’s catalogue to life with a visual language driven by narrative collage. Found images, illustration, and brightly colored scraps of paper pile atop each other to reflect Gimlet’s stories: layers of edits, snapshots, moments, revisions, works in progress.

Grand Army project page

The old logo, in Lineto Circular, was nice because it was in Lineto Circular but, other than that, it literally had nothing else going on, lacking any distinctive or memorable feature. The new logo in a condensed sans serif that emulates broadsheet woodtype has a bolder and more purposeful presence. The underline, while not amazingly creative, provides just enough “flair” to dress up the wordmark and establish a somewhat recognizable element to it. It’s not the most exciting of logos but it looks good, it stands out, and is well executed.

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Not much in terms of business-side applications other than, well, business cards, but I do like the big use of the logo in the back. I’m not sure about the broad color palette — meaning, do they really need that many colors? — and the front of the card takes minimalism a little too far. The highlight of the project, though, and where things start to gel together is the podcast artwork…

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The zine-like aesthetic of the collages give the podcasts a kind of raw, real vibe that provides a nice contrast to the common illustrative-slash-naive graphics of podcast covers. The density of both the logo and monogram stand out very well from the big visual punch of the collages and the grainy, halftone-y look makes the podcasts look like they have been around for a long time, almost like vintage covers of classic books.

The logo and collages come together nicely in covers, show players, and banner ads with the help of Marr Sans and Akzidenz Grotesk Extended providing a good contrast of new and old with Marr Sans having enough personality to be a recognizable element as users are browsing through podcast options. Overall, this shines where it needs to, and the logo provides a strong punctuation to the fun, attractive artwork.