Kontinentalist: A fresh new look, and why we rebranded

We’ve given Kontinentalist a makeover!! Gone are the beige-brown days, and here are the purples, oranges, and pinks.

After working on this for nearly 1.5 years (no kidding), we’re really proud to launch our new look and share with you what happened behind-the-scenes.

The Kontinentalist team will be breaking down why we rebranded, our thought processes, and how we came to this fresh new look — this is the first post in the series!

A brief history of Kontinentalist

Kontinentalist was founded in mid-2017 to enhance Asia’s voice in the global narrative and be the go-to company for information and data about Asian societies from an Asian perspective. Hans — our co-founder — and I believed strongly in the incredible untapped potential and resources in Asia that would benefit many people, as long as there was the will to put it together.

We knew that this was our goal… but we didn’t know how to achieve it.

So first, we put up a simple website, filling it slowly with content that we thought people might be interested in. In one of our earliest projects, we ambitiously decided to gather data on and map out the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2018. We then found ourselves adopting data storytelling techniques in our very first animated and interactive data-driven piece, Understanding the Belt and Road.

Three years later, Kontinentalist has published more than a hundred data-driven stories about Asia — an unthinkable reality for most of us back then.

How do we tell better stories?

In mid-2019, the Kontinentalist team did a milestone brainstorm. We asked ourselves how we might tell better stories, as well as how we might better achieve our vision and mission.