1893 Brand Studio — Rebranding the Agency Itself

If your parent org is one of the most respected student newsrooms in the country, why doesn't your brand look like it belongs to them?

That was the gap 1893 Brand Studio was sitting in. As UNC's student-run marketing agency, 1893 operates under The Daily Tar Heel — an outlet with real, earned credibility — but the agency's own visual identity didn't reflect that connection. To clients and prospective clients, the two didn't read as related, which meant 1893 was leaving trust on the table that its own parent organization had already built.

As lead strategist and project manager, I led the full visual rebrand: logo, color palette, brand guidelines, all the works. Everything was built specifically to align 1893's identity with The Daily Tar Heel's while still keeping it distinct enough to read as a creative agency instead of a newsroom. That meant managing the project end to end: gathering input from the design team and DTH leadership, keeping the timeline on track, and building the strategic case for why the rebrand mattered.