Shit We’ve Read Branding
A Scifi/Fantasy Book Podcast
Design Tools: Adobe Photoshop
In 2021, a friend and I, both passionate readers, launched a book podcast called Shit We've Read to share our literary discussions with a wider audience. We chose the name because it conveyed a fun, unpretentious vibe, immediately signaling to listeners that our content was for adult readers and would include colorful language. We also felt it clearly distinguished us from serious book critics, which we are certainly not.
As designers ourselves, we understood the critical role of branding. We developed several logo concepts, ultimately selecting our favorite after internal review and external feedback.
The chosen logo, featuring big, blocky, and tilted type, perfectly captures the fun, bold, and somewhat chaotic nature we envisioned for our episodes. Its attention-grabbing design led us to select a rich blue as our primary color, complemented by colorful books. This distinctive combination became our standard show art, forming the foundation for all other related assets.
For our first season, we customized each episode's image by adjusting our show art to highlight the featured book, matching the background color to the book's cover. These images were then resized to fit the standards of social media, our primary podcast advertising platform.
For each new season, we update our design to help listeners and followers easily distinguish between them. While we love to experiment with new ideas—including designs that align with sci-fi or fantasy themes, match featured book covers, or even offer genre-specific variations—each new design always maintains a connection to our original brand through the consistent use of similar shades of blue and occasional purple.
See more Shit We've Read designs on Instagram and listen to our episodes by visiting shitweveread.com.

