Case Study

A new platform for Aotearoa's most distinctive media voice_

The Spinoff

Overview

A new digital home for The Spinoff, built to bring its unique voice to life through a sharper brand, a more intuitive experience and a platform that lets the stories shine.

Challenge

The Spinoff has spent more than a decade building Aotearoa’s most distinctive independent media brand, a voice that’s trusted, curious, opinionated and unmistakably itself. But its digital platform hadn’t kept pace with that ambition.

In a fractured media landscape, where attention is dwindling, publishers are fighting to grow audiences, deepen engagement and drive revenue where possible. For The Spinoff, the WordPress CMS the original platform had been built on no longer allowed the team to innovate and evolve at the pace they needed to keep up with audience needs.

The brand needed to move too. It had to be modernised to match the evolving tastes of its audience, and to better represent the maturity of its editorial content. And with a large proportion of the audience accessing The Spinoff on mobile, the site experience had to be truly responsive, delivered through a web app experience. A custom, purpose-built solution was required, giving control back to the editors, audience and commercial teams within the organisation.

Solution

Daylight delivered a full replatform, redesign and brand refresh for The Spinoff, using the principles of its editorial strategy as a lens for how the site should look, feel and behave.

The result is pared back and deliberate. A revised colour palette, new typography, and a fresh graphic style and image treatment let the content do the talking. Navigation puts stories first, with layouts built around how The Spinoff actually publishes, from articles to podcasts and video. A new suite of shapes extends the graphic language across the site, while a revised logo suite and playful animation throughout bring it all to life.

Behind it sits a new platform built on Payload CMS and customised around The Spinoff’s workflow needs. New features include custom editorial templates, audience polls, a comments section, live feeds, a deeper rich media content experience, and improved e-commerce with Stripe integration for member sign-ups. The result is a site that feels more grown-up and refined: better for readers, easier for the team to run, and built to support The Spinoff’s membership revenue.

Services

Audience insights
User-journey mapping
Digital product strategy
Prototype validation
Technical consultancy
Architecture & API integrations
Quality assurance & security testing

Ongoing platform support
App development
Content and information architecture
Digital design
Brand identity systems
Logo development
Animation