Design core: One goal of the redesign was to lean into PBS Newshour’s heritage and rich history as well as the educational part of their brand, to help present it as a long-established voice. We enjoyed digging through the archives to look at historical illustrations and type details, like the use of italics, as well as PBS Newshour’s pages from the more recent past.

Favorite details: We were excited to get to work with Victoria Pasquantonio and Jesse Kemper from the PBS Newshour team on the overall structure. As well as a way to appeal to educators and students alike. The final result was based on a combination of the other properties and a commonality between the brands.

Challenges: The goal was to do a visual refresh of PBS Newshour Classroom site, not a full rebrand. It was difficult considering the educational side of their properties did not have existing brand guidelines or a cohesive extensive brand system already in place. So, we were working in a design system that was somewhat undefined. 

Navigation structure: The core focus for the navigation is to call attention to things we want the user to do or know. The thinking here was that people are not likely to use the navigation to discover content as much; they’re more likely to be coming in via an article shared from another source. So, it was better to use the navigation to talk to the fact that there’s an associated content and related subject matter.

Special technical features: We spent some extra attention working with the Gutenberg block system to give the editors more control over the placement of auxiliary items in the article body—focus topics, calls to action and related links, among other items—while also reducing manual labor. The editors go through their normal workflow of editing the article and inserting images. Then, upon save of the article, the auxiliary items are dynamically placed throughout. The block system enables PBS Newshour’s editors to manipulate and adjust the placement to better suit the content.