Colossal
Meaningful Art with a Massive Impact
The Challenge
Colossal, the wildly popular online art magazine known for celebrating contemporary art, design, and visual culture, had built an enormous and devoted readership over more 15 years. Despite its global influence, Colossal remained a small, Chicago-based team with big ambitions—and an aging brand system. Their challenge was twofold: to create a new visual identity that felt both fresh and familiar, and to redesign their website to better serve an expansive, curious audience while maintaining the soul of the publication.
A collaboration between Colossal and Firebelly had been a long time coming. We’d admired each other’s work for years, so when the opportunity arose, both teams jumped in with trust, transparency, and enthusiasm. We’ve written about our mutual fandom and details of the process on our ideas page — read our strategy, identity, and web processes there.
Our Approach
From the moment we kicked things off — at a buzzing, in-person session — it was clear this new Colossal needed to feel groundbreaking. Instead of refining the existing brand, the Colossal team was ready to break free and explore new territory. We heard about hopes and dreams for the brand and learned what pieces of their identity felt special and crucial to retain. The full brand process was set with a conversation that spanned art, climate science, and lots of laughter — we would be deeply collaborative and unapologetically exploratory.
Research & Strategy
We knew that the Colossal team brought their own creative lens, so at the start, we flipped our typical process. Instead of presenting pre-curated inspiration, we invited Colossal to take lead. They shared art, installations, and reference points that sparked ideas and surfaced themes: “absurd,” “timeless,” “gettin’ big and livin’ small.” The feedback was delightfully diverse — sometimes abstract, occasionally conflicting, but always insightful.
Through a virtually hosted workshop, we explored Colossal’s voice, audience, and aspirations. Aspirations like, being a “curator” rather than a “cheerleader” or finding a why behind all of their whimsy. Ultimately, our discovery made us greater Colossal fans than ever.
We completed a second wave of research solely for website redesign foundations. Equipped with insights from nearly 1,000 surveyed readers and internal stakeholders, we reorganized the site’s architecture to support a structured navigation and spontaneous exploration.
“In beginning the branding work, we heard the importance of retaining the history and connections…”
Identity
After rounds of aligning, playing, and imagining, we crafted a final direction on the logo that is dad & son tested and approved — really! This final, larger-than-life mark brand speaks to the core values: play, whimsy, and curiosity. Subtle adjustments to letterforms (especially the distinctive “S”) helped preserve Colossal’s recognizability while introducing a tongue-in-cheek referential nature.
Brand Guide
A brief guide gathers essential elements and crucial details to get the design team off the ground running.
Website Design
Next, we turned our attention to Colossal’s digital home. The existing site was loved for its endless scroll and minimalist aesthetic, but it struggled to support the brand’s growing ecosystem and diverse audience.
“The joy and energy of the Colossal brand feels familiar and new all at once. We designed the brand system to be playfully expressive yet capable of a visual simplicity to let art & creativity shine.”
Enhanced search and tagging systems make it easier to find specific stories, while the infinite scroll remains for those who just want to wander. The new layout provides more breathing room for artwork and uses subtle animation to invite discovery without distraction.
Illustration by Natalie Shilo
Identity Design
With the mark settled, we expanded the identity system with a flexible color palette and a complementary typographic toolkit designed for digital and editorial contexts alike.
Experimentation
Not every idea made it into the final product — and that’s by design. Some of our most exciting explorations live in a digital sketchbook, ready to inspire the next phase of Colossal’s evolution. We developed motion tests, alternate colorways, print potential, and a full custom typeface that didn’t quite fit the current moment or need but are full of future potential.
Even early logo sketches that were too experimental for the final mark gave us cues for iconography, merch mockups, and extensions of the identity. The same goes for many website components that were explored, shelved, and might resurface when the time is right.
“From our very first meeting with Firebelly, it was like working with an extension of our own team. They streamlined a fraught and complex rebrand and made the entire process thoughtful and joyous. We were so thrilled with the results that we immediately collaborated with them on another project.”
— Christopher Jobson
Looking ahead
What made this project special wasn’t just the outcome — it was the process. It was the joy of working with a team that trusted the work, challenged assumptions, and brought heart to every decision. This collaboration was fueled by creativity, openness, and mutual respect, and the result is a brand and website that feel undeniably Colossal.
We’re honored to have helped shape this new chapter — and can’t wait to see what’s next.