Los Angeleno was a new online magazine about L.A. arts and culture, started by two L.A. natives. They came to me with a list of publications they liked (LA Weekly, LAist, The Paris Review, It’s Nice That) and a few words for how it should feel: airy, modern, a little brutalist, and like L.A. The site had to carry features, interviews, food writing and a weekly list of things to do, with room for ads and sponsored posts, since that’s how it would pay for itself.

I started with a written wireframe and a sitemap, then grayscale wireframes for the homepage, articles, categories and an events calendar. Next came two design directions for the homepage and a standard article, plus a quick logo exercise: a plain wordmark and an LA monogram. Round two pulled the directions together. The gradient stayed, and so did the serif headlines.

The logo kept moving after that. The one it launched with is a serif lockup where the L of Los and the A of Angeleno overlap, so LA is hiding in the name.

I built it on WordPress, with a child theme on top of a commercial magazine theme. That way the budget went into the parts that were specific to Los Angeleno: the homepage, the article layout, the events calendar, newsletter signup, ad slots and sponsored-post labels. It launched in April 2019.