London, November 2006.

Dezeen started small. The publishing trade site InPublishing reported on 10 March 2021 that Marcus Fairs launched Dezeen as a simple blog in November 2006, working from his spare bedroom in London, and that he began with no outside investment, no business knowledge and no technical skills. Wikipedia dates the launch to the end of November 2006 and describes Dezeen as an online architecture, interiors and design magazine based in London, with offices in Hoxton, New York City and Shanghai.

Fairs came to it from print. Wallpaper*, in a piece dated 4 July 2022, said he studied 3D design before moving into architecture journalism, working for the trade titles Building Design and Building and freelancing for The Guardian and The Independent on Sunday, among others. It said he launched the architecture and design magazine Icon in 2003, before developing Dezeen. InPublishing likewise described him as the journalist who had previously launched and edited Icon.

He was not alone for long. InPublishing reported that Fairs was joined in 2008 by his partner Rupinder Bhogal, a former television production manager, and that the two built the business together as co-founders. Bhogal later served as the company’s HR director and as a board member.

The name is a contraction. In a post dated 2 September 2007, Dezeen says “dezeen” is a corrupted compound of “design” and “magazine”, something it said many people did not realise. The same post noted that some readers had started calling the site “the zeen”, a nickname that fed directly into the design of its wordmark the same year.

The site’s offices spread with it. Wikipedia says Dezeen opened a New York City office in 2015 and a Shanghai office in 2021, and that the magazine launched its annual Dezeen Awards programme in 2018, adding a Chinese programme in 2023. Dezeen’s own site today runs sections for jobs, events, courses and a product showroom alongside its architecture, interiors, design and technology news.

A split wordmark in 2007, and a relaunch in 2016.

Dezeen’s look dates from its opening full year. In its post of 2 September 2007, Dezeen says it asked the Swiss designer Micha Weidmann for an identity that was as simple as possible but stylish enough for a design-minded readership. The result was a purely typographic wordmark set in Akzidenz Grotesk, a sans serif that Dezeen says dates back to 1896 and was a precursor to faces such as Helvetica and Univers. Dezeen says the face suited the name because of its very circular letterforms, and in particular its round lower-case e, a letter the word “dezeen” uses three times.

The detail that makes the mark recognisable is a break. Dezeen says Weidmann split the word in two, partly to show that it joins “design” and “magazine”, and partly as a nod to the nickname “the zeen”. Dezeen’s own later description of the logo, in 2016, called it “wonderfully lopsided”.

The wordmark came with a layout. The design news site Dexigner reported on 20 October 2016 that Weidmann created Dezeen’s logo and original layout in 2007, moving the magazine away from its basic WordPress template. It said he used typographic techniques from content-heavy editorial websites to give the site bigger typography, bolder colours and a simple three-column structure.

That system ran until 2016 with minor changes. On 11 October 2016 Dezeen published a note introducing a new-look site, which it described as an iteration of the 2007 look rather than a redesign. Dezeen says it had tried several times over the years to replace its cluttered, narrow grid and small images with other design firms, and twice discarded radical redesigns, before going back to Weidmann. The development work, it says, was done by Bill Kingston and his team at Den Creative. The brief was to make Weidmann’s design simpler and cleaner, to look more grown up, and to let the content speak for itself, and Dezeen says it left the logo untouched.

Dexigner, reporting the same relaunch, said the new design kept the original typographic approach at its core while adapting to the growth of social media and mobile reading, and to Dezeen’s growth from an architecture and design blog into a brand spread across several channels. It quoted Weidmann saying the new typography and structure would reinforce the site’s signature identity, including its trademark logo.

A grotesque wordmark, split in two.

A design publication is read as much as it is looked at, and its identity has to work across every surface it touches. The masthead is the anchor: a wordmark that sits at the top of a cover, a website header and a social avatar, and has to stay legible at the width of a phone screen as well as on a newsstand. Around it, covers and grids carry the voice from issue to issue. A cover system might fix the masthead position and leave the image to change, or treat each cover as a commission and let only the type stay constant. Inside, the grid, the body face and the caption style set the pace of reading.

Online, the same identity is stretched across websites and newsletters, where it has to survive templates, thumbnails and inbox previews. Many titles also run events, talks and annuals, and each of these becomes a brand surface in its own right, with its own posters, stage graphics and printed books. Read together, these pieces show how a publication keeps one recognisable voice while its formats keep changing.

A Danish owner from 2021, new leaders from 2022.

Dezeen changed hands in its fifteenth year. InPublishing reported on 10 March 2021 that Dezeen had been acquired by the Danish group JP/Politiken Media Group, which it described as owned by two private trusts, and that the deal was the group’s debut acquisition outside Scandinavia. InPublishing said Dezeen would keep its editorial independence and its senior team: Fairs stayed on as chief executive and editor-in-chief, Bhogal as HR director, Benedict Hobson as chief content officer and Wai Shin Li as chief revenue officer. Anders Heering of the Danish group and special adviser Peter Normann joined Fairs and Bhogal on a new board. JP/Politiken Media Group has owned Dezeen since 2021.

Fairs explained the sale in an article in his own voice that InPublishing quoted. He said he wanted Dezeen “to forever be a bastion of independent journalism, a champion of architecture and design and a force for good in the world”, and that in the Danish group the company had found a soul mate.

The founder’s tenure ended the following year. Wallpaper* reported on 4 July 2022 that Fairs had died on 30 June 2022, and that his death had been announced on Dezeen’s website and social channels. InPublishing, on 5 July 2022, reprinted Dezeen’s statement, which said the site would publish no stories for twenty-four hours.

New leadership followed. InPublishing reported on 8 November 2022 that Hobson and Li, who had been appointed acting managing directors by JP/Politiken Media Group after Fairs died, would lead the company permanently as co-CEOs, with Bhogal continuing in the senior management team as a founding director and board member. Wikipedia names the writer and architectural historian Tom Ravenscroft as editor.

Through these changes the visual identity has stayed close to its 2007 form. Weidmann’s split wordmark, black on white, still heads the site, and Dezeen says Weidmann has gone on to create identities for its own events and the Dezeen Awards, extending the same typographic idea rather than replacing it.

For a design guide, Dezeen shows how a single typographic decision — one grotesque, one break in a made-up word — can carry a publication from a bedroom blog to a company with offices in London, New York and Shanghai. Compare Wallpaper*, the London design title whose editors wrote about Fairs in 2022, and It’s Nice That, another London creative site that began online. For this guide we use wordmark black, column grey and screen white with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dezeen’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.