Creating a Brand Guideline to Preserve the Identity of Magazinc!

When I joined Magazinc! in 2019, I was looking for something different from the highly formal student organizations I had spent years working within. As a design graduate pursuing a master’s degree in management at the time, I was already balancing academic and professional responsibilities, so joining a student media community felt like a more relaxed way to stay involved while continuing something I genuinely enjoyed. That didn’t stop me from noticing a problem almost immediately. Magazinc! had an established visual identity, but it had never been properly documented as a coherent system.

For an organization that had existed since before Telkom University was established, this was more significant than it initially appeared. The members didn’t necessarily share the same understanding of Magazinc!’s history, identity, or way of communicating, and I certainly couldn’t claim to know everything about an organization I had only joined years after its major transformation. But without proper documentation, many decisions had to be rediscovered by every new generation over and over again. As someone with experience managing publication channels, I saw a brand guideline as an opportunity to preserve more than visual assets. It could establish the principles that defined how Magazinc! should represent itself.

From Logo to Identity

I started with the most obvious part of a brand guideline: the logo itself. Magazinc! had introduced its current logo around the time of Telkom University’s establishment in 2013, and by the time I joined, it was already widely recognized. I didn’t see a really compelling reason to redesign something that was already distinctive, aesthetically successful, and familiar to its audience.

Instead, I focused on understanding what the existing identity could communicate. In the guideline, I described the logo through its blob-like form, representing a creative and dynamic mass media organization that responds to the phenomena around it. That interpretation connected naturally with the organization’s long-standing “Bebas Berisik!” tagline and provided a conceptual foundation for the rest of the guideline.

The next problem was practical. The original logo had only one configuration, which worked reasonably well in larger applications but became difficult to read when reduced to a social media profile picture, website favicon, or other small digital context. I therefore developed several configurations around different sizes and color treatments, including primary, secondary, and achromatic alternatives. I also documented its construction, proportions, and safe area so that the logo could remain recognizable across different applications.

The guideline then expanded into color composition, typography, and examples of brand application across printed media, digital media, and organizational attributes such as uniforms and ID cards. These were familiar components of a graphic standard manual (or GSM for short), but while working through them, I realized that documenting visual elements was only part of the problem. The more important question was: How those elements could collectively support the character that Magazinc! wanted to project?

Protecting Independence Through Design

That question became particularly important because of Magazinc!’s unusual position within the university ecosystem. After Telkom University was established through the merger of several higher education institutions, Magazinc! lost its previous legal status rather than merging with another journalism organization. It later developed a partnership with the university’s Student Executive Board, which provided practical support but also created the possibility that the media could gradually be perceived as part of another organization.

For a journalist, obviously that distinction matters. A media organization needs to maintain its independence and reputation, especially when its relationship with another organization could create a perception of affiliation or influence. I had been involved in the Student Executive Board myself before joining Magazinc! community, so I was familiar with both sides of the situation and understood why this could become problematic if left unresolved.

This was where the GSM became more than a visual reference document. I explicitly established that Magazinc!’s logo should appear on its organizational attributes and that those attributes shouldn’t contain the identity of another organization. The intention wasn’t to control every creative decision members could make, but to establish a visible boundary around the organization’s identity and reinforce its independence as a media organization.

I considered this the most practical contribution I could make at the time. Magazinc!’s position within the university was complicated, and I couldn’t resolve its institutional status through design. What I could do was create a clear, documented standard that could communicate what the organization represented and potentially become stronger over time if future members continued to preserve and apply it.

A Personal Design Exercise

The GSM was never part of my formal responsibilities within the organization. I proposed it as a personal project to the organization and continued developing it alongside my academic and professional commitments, communicating with current members and providing regular updates throughout the process. I had seen how physical documentation could evolve from recommendations into organizational rules when it was logical, reasonable, well documented, clearly communicated, and properly preserved.

The book was completed in October 2020, several months after I had already demissioned from Magazinc! and completed my master’s degree. Looking back, the project taught me that a brand guideline isn’t simply a catalogue of visual artifacts. Designing one requires understanding the character, history, relationships, and intended perception of the entity being represented, then translating those considerations into a coherent system that can survive beyond the person who originally created it.

Brand identity had never been my preferred area of design. My interests have always leaned more toward interactive and digital media, so I would normally avoid this kind of work when given the choice. Yet, this project gave me a better understanding of why identity design matters. The challenge wasn’t merely making Magazinc! look consistent, but to design a system that could help the organization communicate who it was, preserve what made it distinctive, and maintain that identity within an increasingly complicated ecosystem.