Nukta — Brand strategy and visual identity for an international news platform
Brand strategy · Positioning · Visual identity · Brand guidelines
Media and publishing · Dubai, UAE & Pakistan
The context
In 2023, Nukta was a business plan.
Kamran Khan, one of Pakistan's best-known broadcasters, was building a digital-first news organisation headquartered in Dubai, covering the UAE, Pakistan and India. There was no site, no newsroom, no audience, and no brand of any kind.
Tanya Abbasi, co-founder and Chief of Brand, brought me in to create it.
The challenge
News brands run on trust, and trust is usually a function of time.
Nukta was launching against players with decades of it, into two markets with different problems.
In the UAE, the serious titles were serious and slightly staid. Gulf News, Khaleej Times, The National, all credible and none of them built for anyone under forty. At the other end sat Lovin Dubai, with the young audience and very little substance. Nothing occupied the middle, which is where the readers actually are. Seventy per cent of UAE residents aged eighteen to twenty-four consume news daily.
Pakistan had a different problem. Going through the major news sites, it was hard to tell them apart. No signature colour, no distinct identity, the same layouts repeating. You could forget which one you were reading while you were reading it.
Both observations pointed the same way. Nukta had to be credible enough to be believed and distinctive enough to be remembered, in a category where almost nobody managed both.
The approach
The answer was already in the name.
A nukta is the dot in Urdu and Arabic script that distinguishes one letter from another. The same shape with a different dot is a different letter and a different word. It's the smallest mark in the alphabet and it changes the meaning entirely.
For a news organisation that was the right idea to build on. Precision. The detail that changes what something means. And it gave a brand with no history a reason to be trusted that wasn't about history.
So the identity became the dot. A single electric blue mark against near-black, placed where a nukta sits in script, then used as a system rather than a logo detail: closing the headlines, marking the video, carrying the colour through everything. An n. monogram did the work at small sizes, for the app icon and the browser tab.
That mattered more than it sounds. Most readers would meet Nukta as a thumbnail in a feed rather than on a homepage, so the brand had to be recognised before it was read.
The work
Brand strategy and positioning, including market analysis across the UAE and Pakistan, audience research, and a competitive review covering traffic, demographics and visual territory for every major title in both markets.
Positioning, brand character and a promise of being a window into what matters.
An editorial content strategy, setting out a balance of coverage that would build a daily habit rather than a crisis-only audience.
Then the visual identity: logo and monogram, colour, typography, art direction and layout systems, delivered as full brand guidelines plus style guides for social, so a newsroom spread across ten countries could apply it without me.
The impact
Nukta launched in November 2024 from Dubai, with newsrooms across Pakistan and India and a team drawn from ten countries.
In 2026 the business was acquired by the ARY Group, one of Pakistan's largest broadcasters.
It now publishes daily across the UAE, Pakistan, India and international news, with more than 400,000 followers across its regional social channels. Most of the visual rules written in 2023 are still in use.
Tell me about your project
If you're building something that doesn't exist yet and it has to be credible on the day it launches, that's a brand problem before it's anything else. Tell me where you are and I'll come back to you within a working day.