Barq News · identity book · 27 Oct 2026
Breaking news from Palestine. First the flash, then the facts.
Light arrives before thunder.
Barq is Arabic for lightning. In a storm you see the flash, then you count, then you hear it. Breaking news works the same way: first a flash, then the facts. The identity is built on that gap. Every story shows when it was first seen and whether it is still developing; every mark is the flash, and the facts are set calmly around it.
The q strikes.
The name ends in q, the one letter with a tail. The tail is struck as a bolt, the width of the stem it replaces, so the word carries its own flash without a lightning icon beside it. Drawn from Funnel Display 800; every straight corner rounded at 22 of 1200 units, the tip at 12, so the cut stays soft.
Ion, storm and cloud.
One accent only. Ion is the violet a real strike leaves on the retina; it marks the flash, the developing state and nothing else. Storm carries the wire and the map; white and cool cloud greys carry the reading. No red for urgency, no beige for warmth.
Age ramp, as lightning maps fade a strike:
The flash, the text, the clock.
NORD ID · OFL · 300–800
Headlines, figures, the wordmark
NORD ID · OFL · 300–800, italic
Reading text and interface
Eben Sorkin · OFL · 300–700
Times, datelines, sources
Three states, one clock.
Still moving. A violet dot, breathing like a strike on a lightning map.
Named sources agree. The dot becomes a ring: the light has passed, the fact stays.
The clock, set in Spline Sans Mono, always in Jerusalem time.
The flash map and the strike line.
Two pictures only Barq has. The flash map puts every story where it happened and fades it with age. The strike line lays a week of flashes in seven lanes, so a reader sees at a glance where the news is falling.
Flash map
live on the home page
Every dot is a link to its story. The newest strike pulses while it is still developing; a dot older than a week turns grey and stays, so the map keeps the memory of where the news fell.
Strike, flash, settle.
The loader runs once a session, 1.7 seconds, and skips on a click or Escape: the bolt strikes down into place, the screen flashes twice like real lightning, the letters rise and the bolt cools from plasma to white. On the page, the map's dots land in the order they happened; the wire runs and pauses on hover; developing dots breathe. With reduced motion, all of it is still.
52 stories, 27 places, one wire.
Home, a page for every story, seven sections, the wire, the flash map and a page for every place on it, the archive, our sources, alerts, send a tip, search, about and standards, privacy, credits and a 404.