South Side Community Media

South Side Weekly and the Hyde Park Herald had shared an office for two years before merging into a single nonprofit. The Herald had covered Hyde Park since 1882, the third-oldest paper in Chicago. The Weekly had built a newer but no less rooted following covering the same part of the city with a sharper focus on arts and civic life. Both papers were staying intact under the merger. What the organization lacked was a name and identity for the entity now standing behind them, one that could unify two mastheads with different histories without flattening either.

Substance worked with leadership from both papers to develop a name and identity for the new parent nonprofit, drawing from naming directions built around community, voice, and neighborhood rather than geography alone. That range gave the organization room to grow past the South Side if its mission ever called for it, and it led to a name built around the thing both papers actually do: carry the voice of the community back to itself.

Brand Vision

The mark is built around a set of quotation marks, rendered as bold orange stencil-cut shapes bookending a stenciled, all-caps wordmark. That same orange and stencil-cut mark carry through the broader system, including a warm duotone photography treatment used across signage and merchandise. The identity gives the organization a consistent presence while leaving each publication’s own identity, and the trust readers had built with it, untouched.

South Side Community Media now gives both papers shared infrastructure and a combined story to bring to funders and readers, while preserving the individual identities each had spent decades building in its own community. As the organization pursues new revenue and grant opportunities, the brand gives it a name and identity equal to the role it now plays behind two of the South Side’s most established news outlets.