Designing inside a national news brand

NBC News Radio and NBC News NOW needed a marketing presence under the iHeartMedia partnership — a single page that could work every angle at once — build awareness for NBC News audio, drive affiliate adoption, and open advertiser and agency interest.

The primary audience was advertisers and agencies — the buyers deciding where to place audio spend — so the page had to make NBC News audio feel like a property worth investing in, not just a service to sign up for.

NBC News carries decades of visual equity — the peacock, the typography, the gravity of a national news organization. The page had to feel unmistakably like NBC while still earning attention as a marketing piece. That's a narrower creative lane than a blank canvas, and the more interesting design problem for it: distinctiveness within constraints, not despite them.

News lives in two visual registers: the dark, cinematic weight of breaking coverage and the clean editorial light of daytime programming. Rather than pick one, the site shipped with a dual-theme system — dark cinematic and light editorial. The two came out of a stakeholder request paired with an A/B exploration: instead of debating one look in the abstract, both were built as real, switchable experiences the team could compare and test.

The hero doesn't describe the product — it is the product: an interactive audio player built on the Web Audio API, so the first thing a visitor does is hear NBC News. It was wired to refresh daily — pulling in current audio samples automatically — so the hero always played something timely rather than a stale canned clip, and the page felt alive every time a buyer came back to it.

Because I build what I design, the hero was prototyped directly in code — the interaction was tested as a working page, not described in annotations.

Design and build were the same pair of hands: semantic HTML, a theme system in CSS, motion tuned in the browser, validated markup and scripts before delivery. What stakeholders approved is what shipped — to the pixel and to the interaction.

The sales team loved it and leaned on it, and the site generated real buzz internally — exactly the reception a marketing page for a premium audio property is supposed to earn from the people who have to sell it.