NEW STANDARD.S gives climate journalism critic Brandmelder an identity — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Brandmelder observes climate reporting in German media and puts it in context, pointing out the patterns that keep recurring. It is an editorial project of Netzwerk Klimajournalismus Deutschland e.V., a network that brings climate knowledge into newsrooms. Berlin-based sustainability consultancy and creative studio NEW STANDARD.S was commissioned to create the brand strategy, identity and website in a month, with social media assets, merchandise and a custom image tool alongside.

“We came in with a specific problem: Brandmelder had to be taken seriously as a critic by the very newsrooms it analyses, which meant it couldn’t read as activism,” Brandmelder’s Communication Manager Inga Mücke tells us. “The brief was to make credibility visible and speak to an audience beyond the green bubble.”

Brandmelder launched in March 2026 with an identity of its own rather than under the Netzwerk Klimajournalismus name. Its strapline is Klima braucht Kontext, or climate needs context. “For us, it was important to give it a more neutral face – a distinct identity that speaks to the mainstream,” Mücke explains. NEW STANDARD.S worked up three routes, presented two and settled on the final one quickly.

The identity’s imagery is made of dots on a grid. “A simple visual idea became the anchor of the brand’s design system,” NEW STANDARD.S’ designer Louis Rienäcker notes. “It connected to the network as the project’s initiator, gave us a visual logic, and once we built the tool around it, the whole system fell into place.” The grid is an extension of the two-by-two dot logo of Netzwerk Klimajournalismus.

“As we turn the imagery of the articles the journalists are analysing into the dot grid, we make clear that it’s their very own view and perspective,” NEW STANDARD.S’ Managing Director Maximilian Mauracher tells us. “We use a simple p5.js tool for it and built some of the code with the AI,” he continues. “We use AI responsibly and not in a way that replaces creatives like photographers or illustrators, but in this project we had to find a way to work with existing footage and alter it strongly in a way the Brandmelder can replicate consistently. Making our own little tool for that was the solution.”

Dinamo’s ABC Pelikan sets the wordmark, while ABC Otto was chosen for the body copy. “We felt that the combination of them strikes a nice balance between editorial and a bold, contemporary look,” Mauracher details. “We wanted to steer away from a more obvious colour palette for climate topics like greens or something too activist like red or bright orange,” he explains. The climate stripes are a famous graphic of global warming, with a coloured bar for every year. “We took the four colours from blue to coral from the climate stripes, but by not applying them in the known way and instead separate, people don’t necessarily see that origin – and that’s fine.” “It’s a subtle nod to the climate activism bubble insiders understand, but nobody gets thrown off by,” Mücke notes.

The palette is easy to combine, so the in-house team doesn’t have to work out which colour goes where. On the website, each of the four colours marks a different content category, but on other channels the team uses them freely. The text is always black, so social content is quick to make and always legible.

“In the day-to-day work, our team works with templates that are easy to use – but the best thing is the custom-made tool that translates images into the halftone grid,” Mücke details. “The trade press and traditional media paid attention and sparked an industry-internal discussion,” Mücke concludes, speaking on the impact of the identity so far.