Meedan’s design evolution: Illustrating the future
With 2026 here, we’ve updated our look. Find out what’s on our mind this year.
With 2026 here, we’ve updated our look. Find out what’s on our mind this year.
Since last year, we’ve been embarking on a widespread brand evolution. In keeping with our recent change in leadership and our drive to develop an AI-powered tool that serves the public interest — recently dubbed Suwali — we knew that it was time to take stock of how we express ourselves.
Our values remain unchanged. We’ve just got some new tools for sharing them.
This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Meedan’s new logo, created by our senior graphic designer, Kipp Jones.
Made of two interlocking scripts, the image is intended to evoke language, hyperlinks, and ultimately, the various pathways we all chart independently but that eventually merge together into vast knowledge networks.
Across our entire website, you’ll notice further navigational, editorial, and graphic updates that we hope will bring us closer to clarifying our vision in constant collaboration with the world around us.
Let’s mobilize knowledge networks together.
Our brand evolution, ongoing research, and tool building are just some of the ways we respond to the challenging climate of the moment.
In a recent interview with TechRadar, Access Now Executive Director Alejandro Mayoral Baños identified “surveillance, censorship, and shrinking civic space” as the top digital rights threats facing our world this past year. Indeed, in the absence of robust regulatory guardrails, we’re seeing the ascendancy of tools ranging from killer robots to Grok and its ability to “undress” photos of unsuspecting women. It’s clear that there’s a steep climb ahead.
But AI is hardly a monolith — we know that narrowly bound deployments of AI can help advance information equity. A 2025 year-end Reuters Institute industry survey on media and technology in 2026 revealed that, while newsrooms remain skeptical of the output generated by leading commercial AI products, many view some forms of artificial intelligence as operationally important. The survey’s most popular AI use cases centered on coding, development, and task automation. More than 80% of respondents also said artificial intelligence would be somewhat or very important for newsgathering efforts, including finding stories.
We agree. That’s why we’re keen to introduce our readers to Suwali, a new tool that provides narrowly tailored, purpose-built AI features to help newsrooms inform, listen to, and learn from their readers, all at scale.
This blog post was adapted from the January 2026 edition of our monthly newsletter, the Checklist. Subscribe today
