Illustration of a simplistic Earth with icons around it connected by dashed lines representing various scientific and environmental concepts like DNA, satellite, wind turbine, and energy, with a person sitting on top and the phrase 'BE GIANT' in bold red text below.

Be Giant

Overview

Be Giant arrived with a clear and urgent mandate: build a credible, ambitious editorial platform for Canada in 60 days. An independent, non-partisan, non-profit media outlet created to uncover and amplify the country's most ambitious ideas, Be Giant set out to report on the thinkers, builders, and problem-solvers shaping the future of Canada with curiosity, optimism, and rigorous journalism.August was brought in as the lead strategic and design partner, working alongside Field Office on development and engineering, and directly with Editor-in-Chief Alison Uncles and Digital Editor Prajakta Dhopade to bring this mandate to life.

Sector

Digital Media

Role

Product Strategy

UX/UI Design

Website Design

Illustration Direction

Approach

We started with the Product Blueprint, locking the content architecture, site structure, CMS decision, and measurement plan. Everything downstream flowed from that foundation.
On the design side, we opened with three distinct directions to give the editorial team uniquely positioned options while sharpening our own thinking. The final system carried the typographic authority of the boldest concept with the content-first architecture the platform needed.
Be Giant was not built as a news site. It publishes considered, well-reported stories, with the intention of engaging a reader fully rather than competing for a click. That editorial philosophy shaped nearly every design decision. Large immersive hero banners give each story the space it deserves. A masonry grid lets the archive breathe without hierarchy becoming a competition. The design gets out of the way and lets the journalism do its job.

Credits

Logo: Zulu

Web Development: Field-Office

Tablet screen showing an article titled 'The Biggest Bet in the Oilpatch' with an illustration of three industrial figures holding large nets capturing smoke from factory chimneys against a green landscape and cloudy sky.

The Visual Identity

Zulu Alpha Kilo handed us a mark, a typeface direction, and a red. Our job was to take those elements and give them the depth and range a modern digital platform needs, one that could flex across a newsletter, TikTok videos, long-form features, and a social without losing itself.

Systems

Be Giant is anchored in three pillars — people, places, and ideas — and almost every story is rooted somewhere specific. We built a generator that takes coordinates and produces a topographic line drawing of that location, which becomes the base layer of each cover image. Photography and constellation lines — dots linked by lines, forming patterns that shift depending on the story — layer on top. The result looks considered without being precious, and specific without being literal. We also built a tool to generate constellation graphics at speed, because daily publishing means you cannot hand-craft every asset.

Website

The website was the deliverable. Every decision made laddered up to a new immersive reading exprience. Alongside our friends at Field-Office, who championed the development, we set forth in creating a robost site architecture, one that considered the scale of the team’s ambition and the importance of the stories.

Collage of four black-and-white close-up portraits showing diverse faces with varied expressions on a dark red background.

Hand holding a laptop against a cloudy sky background; the laptop screen displays a webpage titled 'What it takes to build a business in Canada right now: exclusive poll' with a pink geometric illustration below the title.

Palette

We kept the bold red and built outward from it, assigning a distinct colour to each of Be Giant's editorial series: warm, bright, slightly unexpected. Purple for one. A burnt orange for another. A yellow that pops. Together the palette reads as optimistic and in a media moment that often defaults to urgency, this is a refreshingly unique take. Colour doesn't show up the same way everywhere. On social media it's full-bleed and loud. Inside an article it's a small accent, a quiet signal that you're in a particular corner of the brand's world.

Illustrations

To give Be Giant a visual voice as hopeful as its journalism, we brought in Toronto illustrator Maya Nguyen, whose editorial work has appeared in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail. Maya created a library of line illustrations that runs through the whole site, from the hero globe to the spot art for each recurring series. Her work plays on the name itself. Small figures stand beside outsized objects, perched on a globe, steering a hot-air balloon lifted by a brain, calling out through a megaphone three times their height, so every illustration stages a person taking on something giant. That shift in scale carries the editorial idea of Canadians behind ambitious ideas, and it gives each franchise a scene of its own that reads as Be Giant at a glance across the site, the newsletter and social.

Person wearing a white and red jacket holding a beige canvas tote bag with a black line drawing of a hot air balloon shaped like a brain with birds and clouds around it.

Typography

Be Giant’s voice needed to flex between different tones, from approachable and modern on social to credible and serious on long-form. We also know that editorial headlines are unpredictable; some are short and punchy, some run long and complex. We landed on a pairing of Serrif Condensed and Gibson. On headings, Serrif, a workhorse serif built to stay legible under pressure, at display sizes, credible yet modern flair while Gibson can do the heavy lifting on body copy and in occasion on headings for an extra digital feeling.

Headline text on a subtle grid background with gradient red to pink highlight reading 'How Canada’s leading space company plans to build and protect.' Below is a subheading mentioning MDA Space CEO Mike Greenley discussing space sovereignty, cooperation with the U.S., and protecting Canada from above, followed by author and date details.

Quote saying, 'Ultimately, it’s global awareness and local readiness. This is a whole-of-society challenge. We often just look to government, but the reality is every one of us has a part to play.' attributed to Dr. Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot.

Illustration of a curved Earth surface with a person reading a book while sitting on a leaf above it. Surrounding the Earth are colorful icons representing innovation themes like a satellite, wind turbine, DNA strand, planet, and technology symbols, connected by dashed lines. Below, text reads: 'All day, every day, we read stories that provoke anger, fear and hopelessness, stories rewarded by algorithms. But those are far from the only stories worth telling.'

Social Media

From the start, a strong social presence was one of Be Giant's key measures of success. Reaching new audiences where they spend most of their time, and engaging them with stories and visuals in a fresh way, was critical to the launch. Our evolution of the identity into these channels carried that thinking through, with a series of templates that help the team reinforce the brand consistently, create thumb-stopping visuals and stand apart from the sameness coming out of legacy outlets. Social is where the gradients are pushed furthest, type choices are made with care, and movement becomes central to how the brand shows up.

Close-up of two delicate white mushrooms growing on dark, textured wood with green moss, against a muted olive background.

Collage system

Editorial stories are often hard to illustrate. Articles can cover ideas that don’t yet exist, places that are hard to reach or innovations that are difficult to capture. For all those reasons, Be Giant needed a system of covers that could easily be assembled in a pinch. To help, we developed a series of layers that can be juxtaposed to create compelling story main art.

We developed a way to create bespoke topographic maps of the places where the story get’s told, content placeholders, Be Giant dots (which we named constellations) and foreground elements.
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The result is a system that is hyper flexible and lets the story elements shine through.

Diagram showing labeled design elements: a central photo of a landscape with wind turbines marked as IMAGE CUTOUT; layered black and white contour lines behind labeled MAP TEXTURE; a yellow circle labeled CONSTELLATION behind a rocket image labeled FOREGROUND/SUBJECT on the left; and a white rectangular panel in the far background labeled BACKGROUND.

Collage showing a man speaking with a microphone, three other smaller photos of men, industrial refinery, a dam, and five flags including Canada, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, with text about Canada's biggest investment summit.

A man wearing a cap and green jacket is using a tablet inside a boat cabin with windows, controls, and equipment visible.

Digital Editor

As part of our ongoing engagement with the Be Giant team, we’ve help shape and craft several impactful stories that have reached thousands of Canadians from coast to coast. The range of visuals shows the depth of journalism while always centralizing on opportunity and optimism. The main art tells a story, hooks the reader but most importantly, helps to bolster the sense that our nation has great people, in great places doing great things.