A rebrand that had to keep its logo.

The Beacon is a nonprofit newsroom covering Kansas and Missouri. They built their early reputation as a scrappy alternative to legacy local news, doing real journalism on community issues. Their brand still looked like that startup phase, and it hadn't changed since they launched about six years earlier.

They were going into a new round of funding and wanted to present as more professional and more grown up. The ask was a new logo and wordmark plus a new look for the website and everything around it. They also wanted it to stay recognizable to current readers, so the new brand had to work as an extension of the old one using the same colors.

Years earlier The Beacon had filed a trademark on their original logo. They assumed it wasn't something they'd be able to defend, so keeping that logo wasn't a priority when we started.

A couple weeks into logo revisions it came through. Their lawyer confirmed the mark had cleared the opposition period and all they had to do was defend it. That was good news and bad news. They had the trademark, and they could no longer replace the logo.

The way I explained it to them, the logo is a small piece of a brand. What people actually experience is how the newsroom shows up everywhere else: the website, written materials, social. That's where the update needed to happen, so I built the brand around those details.

The brand book became the main deliverable. The team is small and needed one place to look things up, especially for the website.

Since registration depended on using the mark unaltered, the logo section works as a guardrail. Black or white only, no accent colors, and no modifications on anything external-facing. Regional lockups for Kansas City, Wichita, Kansas, and Missouri handle local coverage without touching the trademark.

They kept the same palette with new rules for how much of each color to use. Black and white carry most of a page, and red is reserved for buttons and calls to action. Typography assigns a weight to every role, and an accessibility page lists approved text and background pairings checked against WCAG contrast.

Images were the biggest problem. Every story leads with an editorial photo, and it's the first thing a reader sees on the site or in a feed. The team was choosing them without any shared criteria, so I wrote rules for picking one, along with an annotated example.

The book also covers boxes and buttons, templates for social posts, and a tightened set of writing guidelines.

The Beacon used the brand book to launch their new website. They kept the trademark and still got the more professional look they needed going into the funding round.

The team works from one document now instead of improvising each time.