Description:

‘Find Your Corner of The Spinoff’ is a membership drive that turns our audience's content preference data into reasons to become paying subscribers.

Using on-site analytics, we mapped The Spinoff’s most popular topics and formats to a set of unique scales that we refer to as ‘content compasses’. A simple, yet powerful graphic device for celebrating what people love most from The Spinoff, with each axis showcasing a different corner of journalistic coverage. Then, through a simple digital survey, we invited our audience to reflect on where they stood, reminding themselves of the content they love and should support if they want it to continue.

These findings became a vibrant nationwide campaign, turning real readers, listeners, and watchers into advocates for independent journalism, with colour playing an essential role in its visual cohesion.

The Spinoff is known as the most colourful digital publisher in Aotearoa, both aesthetically and in editorial tone. Our design system needed to not only live up to that, but use colour in a way to grab attention for this vital membership drive.

At the heart of this initiative is a responsive design system where every layout, in every media placement is dictated by data. On the backend, the system creates imagery areas within the content compasses by correlating survey results against media specs. This gives us the option to showcase an individual content preference, all the way through to a group overview, in any media we choose.

While this design system was complex to develop, we ensured the end result was anything but - through a visual approach that champions clarity. To achieve this we needed negative space within our artwork, which was delivered by our boldly coloured backgrounds. Drawn from The Spinoff’s brand palette, these provide the perfect base for our contrasting black content compass and typography.

This ethos on colour was also carried through into our photography, with special attention given to our audience’s wardrobe and clothing tones complementing the block colour backgrounds of the artwork. A stripped-back studio setting also gave the photography breathing room amongst the saturated layouts, and warm lighting elevated their affection for their chosen content.

Another core feature of this design system is the ‘Find Your Corner’ lockup. It can sit in any corner of the artwork, shifting in relation to where the data and imagery are displayed. Intentionally monochromatic as a relief to the full colour backgrounds, it’s a consistent design thread that holds everything together.

It would have been easy (and even expected) to create a dark, heavy campaign. One that mirrored the current state of journalism in Aotearoa: the redundancies, the closures, the uncertainty. But we made a conscious decision not to dwell in that space.

Instead, we chose optimism. Through a vibrant colour palette, warm photography, and human-first design, we brought light to a conversation often clouded by loss. Not to ignore the seriousness of the moment, but to reframe it with energy, hope, and possibility.