Harlem View

Logo

With the rebrand from Harlem Focus to Harlem View, the new name reflects both the publication’s elevated physical location and its mission to offer fresh perspectives on local news.

The HV logomark draws inspiration from Harlem’s iconic apartment buildings, with the angled leg of the "V" casting a subtle 45° “shadow”. A thick sans serif font was chosen to convey a bold, urban feel. Black was selected as the primary logo color for its versatility across platforms and formats, based on research into contemporary news site branding.

To support future use beyond the website, we provided a flexible logo system with multiple color combinations drawn from the official brand palette — ideal for print, social media, or other marketing materials. Provided are four examples of possible color combinations.

Logotype

Penumbra Sans is an all caps font designed by Lance Hidy in 1994. The Penumbra Sans’ semibold “H” closely resembles the “H” in the urban inspired logomark.

Layouts

We designed a flexible system of templates for Harlem View’s site including core pages like the homepage, Mission, and Contributors, as well as robust article templates. Article layouts feature multiple color themes — inspired by The Outline — and support a variety of content types: headers, videos, images, captions, sliders, pull quotes, tags, and related content modules.

Manual

To ensure a smooth handoff, we created a detailed guide for Harlem View’s team covering how to use the Gutenberg WordPress editor. The manual walks through editing and publishing content, managing categories and series, applying color templates, adding media, and maintaining consistent image sizing — all tailored to the site’s custom setup.

Color Palette

We created an urban palette that reflected the multicultural and colorful area of Harlem. The moodboard images that inspired the color selections were mostly from or of the Harlem [and some Brooklyn] neighborhood(s) and artists.

Design Closeup

We used the colors from the color palette in a variety of ways to make the website, fun, urban and fresh. On category pages, a masked HV logomark overlays article images — reinforcing the Harlem View identity and adding visual breaks to improve long-scroll readability.

Sans serif fonts were used to provide a clean aesthetic with high legibility at all sizes. Alegreya Sans was used to portray the contemporary and urban nature of Harlem. A serif was used to provide contrast and to place emphasis on specific features, such as the series box on the homepage.

We used a mix of Rubik and Merriweather to create a clear visual hierarchy and add personality across different content types. Rubik appears throughout the site in three weights for body text, captions, subheads, and the article feed. Merriweather adds contrast in the homepage slider and Series modules.