20something Appointed as Creative Partner to News Company 'The News Movement'

Creative shop 20something has been brought on as a creative and branding partner to launch The News Movement, a new next-generation news business with the aim of solving the undersupply of trusted, credible content through social channels. 

The News Movement aims to reach a younger generation in the places they are, delivering news-to-knowledge content that feels socially native, peer-to-peer and defeating misinformation.

20something will support The News Movement team from beta launch and ongoing strategy, through to brand identity and social-first design systems. 

Founded by Will Lewis, former CEO of The Wall Street Journal alongside Ramin Beheshti and Eleanor Breen, former colleagues from Dow Jones, The News Movement co-founders also include ex-Editorial Director of BBC News, Kamal Ahmed and Dion Bailey also of WSJ. 

Kamal Ahmed, editor-in-chief and co-founder, says: "The support and big design brains of 20something have helped us immeasurably on our journey to launching The News Movement. We hope people like what we have done together - the vibrant look and feel makes it clear that news comes from many different directions. It's certainly not black and white."

20something now leads on all design and strategy work, in close collaboration with a passionate group of young journalists who make up the on-the-ground reporting team of The News Movement. 

Fran Docx, strategy director at 20something says; “With new-era brands like The News Movement it’s crucial that everything is built from the ground up, with the audience always front and centre but this project has been unique in as much as many of the team creating the content are the audience.

As a result, it’s been possible to create something that they can own as reporters and feels genuinely connected to their way of consuming information. We often find established brands trying to reverse into this position, it’s incredibly exciting to start from the beginning like this with The News Movement and create something genuinely right for how we communicate in 2020s.”

The initial design concept developed by 20something was inspired by The News Movement’s mission to bring together different angles and points of view to create a clearer window into the world. The visual identity sees disparate points in space connected to form a flat 2D shape through which the content is revealed. In this way we communicate a way of seeing and understanding the world which takes into account all relevant points of view to create different and refreshing angles.

Rory Stiff, designer at 20something says “With much traditional news a minefield of misinformation, low quality clickbait, and political bias, when The News Movement approached us with their idea for a social led outlet with a focus on journalistic rigour and quality it immediately felt like a standout project. Taking complex and sensitive subjects and distilling them into easily digestible content that could spread through social, we felt that hopefully through this project we could shift the tides a little and play our part in creating a better digital landscape.” 

This is the latest win for 20something with the creative company bringing in nine new project clients in 2021 across finance, retail, sport and gaming sectors, including sofa in a box company Swyft to create its first brand campaign, and injecting a new energy, tone, and edge into Chelsea F.C’s long-standing Creative Platform ‘It's a Chelsea Thing’.  

Led by Andrew Barnard, Will Thacker and Fran Docx, the surge of new business and projects has helped 20something grow its revenue 44% in 2021.