Chapter 05 · Sub-brand toolkit

A new property should take an afternoon, not a brand sprint. Here is the recipe.

Twenty-five properties today. Two hundred and fifty by the time we are done. The math only works if launching property #26 is a CSS variable swap, a wordmark, a photographer outreach, and an editor onboarding — not a forty-thousand-dollar brand engagement. This chapter is the recipe. Six steps, three worked examples, one launch checklist.

§ 5.1

What's locked, what flexes

The shape of the system

The reason two siblings look related is structure, not palette. Same wordmark construction. Same headline serif. Same hairline rules. Same kicker grammar. That is what locks. The signature color, the photography mood, the city-specific kicker copy — that is what flexes. This is the lens for every decision in this chapter.

Locked · Inherited by every property

Structure is the family resemblance.

TypeFraunces for headlines. Source Serif 4 for reading. Inter for UI. JetBrains Mono for stamps. No property substitutes any of these.
GrammarMono kicker over every story. Serif headline. Hairline rule between sections. Sentence case voice. Cream paper, never white at the page level.
Core colorBluebonnet for primary roles ( nav, buttons, links ). Rust for alerts and the dot in the wordmark. Same across every property.
ComponentsButtons, cards, badges, ad slots, section rules, the diagonal-stripe placeholder. One Lego set, every property builds from it.
Motion120 ms hover transitions. No parallax, no springs, no bounce. ( See Ch. 06. )
VoiceSmart neighbor. Sentence case. We name the city by name in every headline. We never say "your community."

Flexes · Decided per property

Personality lives in the fingerprint, not the bones.

Signature colorOne color from the pool, applied in three places: masthead stripe, kickers, active-nav indicator. Nowhere else. Picked from the slot board in § 5.5.
WordmarkCity name + the rust dot + the suffix (.Guide / .Scoop / .Insider / .HQ). Fraunces opsz 144, weight 700, letter-spacing −2.6%. Always the same construction.
Photography moodEach market gets a treatment note: golden-hour porches in Texas, fog-and-granite in Maine, oak-savanna in California foothills. ( See Ch. 08. )
Kicker copy"Front page" reads in WilCo. "Harbor" in Newport. "Henderson Hills" or "The Strip" in NV. City-specific noun phrases over rust capital letters.
Local dataWeather widget zip, ticker feed, school district list, election district map, business directory, real estate MLS. Everything geo-pinned.
Editor & voiceOne named local editor per property. Bylines are local people. The voice is consistent across properties — the editor isn't.

§ 5.2

The 6-step recipe

From "let's launch a property" to "it's live"

Six steps. Roughly two-thirds of an afternoon for someone fluent in the system. The rate-limiting step is photography ( step 5 ), not design — every market needs a local photographer on retainer, and that takes a week of outreach, not a week of art direction.

Confirm the market is real.

A property only launches when there is ( a ) a population density that supports a daily readership of at least 5,000, ( b ) no existing strong local-news incumbent, and ( c ) at least three potential local advertisers who can fund the first quarter.

Output: A one-page market memo. Population, median income, top three employers, existing local-news incumbents, three named potential founding sponsors. Filed before any design work begins.

Pick a name and a suffix.

City name plus one of four suffixes — .Guide, .Scoop, .Insider, or .HQ — chosen by market posture. The suffix encodes how the property sees itself ( see § 5.4 ). Two-word city names get a space: Round Rock.Scoop, El Dorado Hills.Insider.

Output: A name on a stickie. Constraint: No two properties in the same metro carry the same suffix.

Draw a signature color from the slot board.

One color, from the twelve in the pool ( Ch. 02 ). Picked on three criteria: does the color evoke the place, does it sit comfortably next to its sibling properties, is there enough headroom to keep launching. If the slot board is full, you have three levers — extend, reallocate, or retire ( § 5.5 ).

Output: One CSS variable in the property's tokens.css. Example: --signature: var(--sig-moss);

Render the wordmark.

Type "City Name" in Fraunces opsz 144 weight 700 with letter-spacing −2.6%, drop in the rust dot, type the suffix. That is the wordmark. No custom drawing. No ligatures. The wordmark is the typeface, not a logo file.

Output: Three SVG sizes ( 24 / 48 / 96 px h ) exported from the Figma master, plus the live-rendered HTML version. The HTML version is the canonical one.

Write the photography brief.

A market-specific one-pager that lives next to the photo brief in Ch. 08. What is the light like here? What are the porches made of? What does the courthouse look like? Hire one local stringer photographer to shoot a starter set of fifty frames before launch.

Output: A one-page brief + a starter library of fifty geo-tagged photos. No stock. No AI-generated humans.

Inherit the rest.

Type, components, motion, ad system, voice, voice-and-tone, sponsorship policy, comments policy, masthead band, the diagonal-stripe ad slot, the Pro badge, the disclosure footer — all inherited from the parent system. No fork. No "but our market wants…". Inherit, don't customize.

Output: A deployed property. The property's tokens.css imports the parent tokens.css and overrides exactly one variable: --signature.

§ 5.3

The wordmark formula

No drawing · Type the wordmark

The wordmark is the typeface, not a logo file. That is the single rule that lets a one-person operation spin up a property without a designer in the room. Type the words. Drop the dot. Done.

Place Henderson City or region name. Fraunces, 700, opsz 144, tracking −2.6%.

The dot . Always rust. Always present. The family marker.

Suffix HQ One of four. See § 5.4 for which.

§ 5.4

Naming taxonomy

Four suffixes · Use exactly one

Each suffix signals a different posture. The suffix is not a marketing choice; it is an editorial one. .Guide is the flagship voice. .Scoop is the suburban-daily voice. .Insider is the rooted-locals voice. .HQ is the operations-and-business voice. Pick on posture, not on aesthetics.

City.Guide Flagship · One per region

The paper of record.

Reserved for the anchor property in each region — the one that gets the bluebonnet primary. Broadest beat, longest stories, deepest civic coverage. Tone: serious, institutional, warm.

WilCo.Guide · the original

City.Scoop Suburb / commuter daily

What's new in the suburb.

Shorter pieces, more events, more food and high-school sports, fewer ten-thousand-word courthouse stories. For places where the dominant story is "things are growing" rather than "things are decided."

Leander.Scoop · Round Rock.Scoop · Newport.Scoop

City.Insider Rooted locals

For people already from here.

Reads like a long-time resident is filing the stories. More history, more "remember when," more service journalism for people who know which streets flood. Cooler palettes, longer commute-feel cities.

Rockland.Insider · EDH.Insider · Forest City.Insider

City.HQ Ops & business front

The chamber-of-commerce voice.

For markets where the lead with business and operations is the right opening — corporate relocation regions, master-planned cities, suburban HQ-belt towns. Heavier on business, real estate, civic operations. Lighter on sports and food.

Henderson.HQ · new in this edition

§ 5.5

Signature color slot board

12 slots + 1 extension · The current state

The current state of the pool. Black bar on the bottom means assigned-and-launched. Grey background means reserved for a planned property. Rust card means extended past the original twelve — see the callout below for the rule.

Current state · Updated May 15, 2026 7 assigned · 5 reserved · 1 extension

Pecan

Leander.Scoop

Paprika

Round Rock.Scoop

Clay

WilCo.Seniors

Wheat

Reserved · Hutto.Scoop

Forest

WilCo.Business Guide

Sage

Reserved · WilCo.Families

Moss

NEW IN v0.4 · Forest City.Insider

Plum

Reserved · WilCo.New Americans

Dock

Newport.Scoop

Slate

Rockland.Insider

Saffron

NEW IN v0.4 · EDH.Insider

Brick

Reserved · Real Estate vertical

Mesa

EXTENSION · Henderson.HQ · see callout

What just happened

Henderson.HQ used a brand-new signature color called Mesa. Here's the rule that lets us do that.

The pool is capped at twelve for a reason. Stop capping it and the system stops looking like a system after the third property. But twelve is a target, not a wall, and at some point a market won't be served by anything in the existing pool. For those moments, you have three levers — and you pick exactly one.

ExtendAdd one slot to the pool — and add it permanently. New name, new oklch value, new role. Use only when no existing slot evokes the place. Mesa was the right call for Henderson: the system had no desert color and the Nevada market is a real market.
ReallocateTake a reserved slot and reassign it. The reservation never gets locked in until the property launches. Moss ( reserved for the Outdoors vertical ) was reallocated to Forest City.Insider in v0.4. The Outdoors vertical can use a category accent.
RetireSunset a slot whose property is dead or paused. The slot goes back to the pool. No active retirements yet. ( Don't retire pre-emptively. )

§ 5.6

Three worked examples

The recipe applied · v0.4 launches

Three new properties spinning up this edition. Each one pressure-tests a different part of the system: a new signature color, a reallocation, and a non-US deployment. None of them broke the system. Two of them flexed it in ways that became permanent.

Henderson, NV Pop. 332,000. Vegas-adjacent, master-planned, business-corridor city. Booming relocation market: HQ-belt for sports franchises, casinos' back offices, and the post-pandemic California exodus. Dry desert light, low-rise stucco, palm and sage. The story here is operations, not sentiment — hence .HQ.

Suffix .HQ — chamber-of-commerce voice. Leads with business, relocation, real estate. Sports and food are lighter sections, not leads.

Signature Mesa · oklch(0.62 0.15 55) · --sig-mesa
Sunrise sandstone — the desert color the pool was missing. Extension slot. Used in masthead stripe, kickers, active nav.

Photo brief Hard desert light, 7 am or 6 pm only. Lots of horizon. People shot wide, in stucco-and-palm settings. Never in casino light. Never in the daytime overhead sun.

Kicker copy "Henderson Hills" · "Green Valley" · "The Strip-adjacent" · "Anthem" · "Inspirada" — neighborhood names work as kickers here. Avoid "Las Vegas."

Editor TBD — recruiting. Looking for a business reporter with 5+ years on the Nevada relocation beat.

GREEN VALLEY

Raiders break ground on $90M practice-facility expansion off St. Rose

By T. Vega · 6 hr ago

Launch target · Q3 2026 New extension

El Dorado Hills, CA Pop. 50,000. Sierra Nevada foothills, oak savanna, gold-country exurb of Sacramento. Affluent, master-planned but with old-California bones — the gold mining history is still on every street sign. The story here is community and longevity, not growth. Locals talk about "the Hills" as a verb.

Suffix .Insider — the rooted-locals voice. Long-form, service journalism, "remember when" stories. Cooler than .Scoop, warmer than .Guide.

Signature Saffron · oklch(0.70 0.13 70) · --sig-saffron
Reallocated from the WilCo Young Pros reservation. Reads as gold-country tan, late-September oak hills. Closest the pool came to "the color of the place" without an extension.

Photo brief Oak-savanna golden hour. Brown grass, scattered live oaks, terracotta rooflines, a hawk in the frame whenever possible. The light is warmer than Texas and softer than Nevada — closer to Tuscany than to the high desert.

Kicker copy "Town Center" · "Bass Lake" · "Cameron Park" · "Folsom Lake" · "The Hills" — local geographies work as kickers. Avoid "Sacramento" except for crossover stories.

Editor Recruiting from the Sacramento Bee / Folsom Telegraph alumni pool. Need someone who already lives in 95762 or 95630.

TOWN CENTER

EDH Town Center adds 12,000 sf of restaurant space — local-only-leases mandate stays

By C. Mendez · 2 hr ago

Launch target · Q2 2026 Reallocated slot

London, Ontario Pop. 423,000. Southwestern Ontario, known locally as the Forest City for the canopy that still covers Old North and Old South. University town ( Western ), regional medical hub, manufacturing heritage. We can't call it London.Insider — that name fights with the British capital. So the wordmark uses the local nickname: Forest City.Insider.

Suffix .Insider — the rooted-locals voice. Multi-generational families, university town with a permanent population. The voice matches Rockland.Insider more than any Texas property.

Signature Moss · oklch(0.48 0.07 130) · --sig-moss
Reallocated from the Outdoors-vertical reserve. The literal moss color of the canopy the city is named for. The Outdoors vertical will use a category accent instead.

Photo brief Maple canopy, brick row-housing, Thames-river fog mornings, fall colors September through November. The light is softer and bluer than any US property. Hire one stringer who already shoots for The London Free Press.

Kicker copy "Old North" · "Old South" · "Wortley" · "Byron" · "Hyde Park" · "Western" — local neighbourhoods. UK spelling stays American to match the system. Currency is CAD with a small CA$ prefix.

Editor Recruiting from the Western Gazette alumni pool. Looking for a city-hall reporter with a paper-of-record disposition.

OLD NORTH

Western buys block of Wortley Village houses — heritage status flagged by neighbourhood board

By S. Macleod · 1 day ago

Launch target · Q4 2026 Reallocated slot · First non-US

§ 5.7

Launch checklist

Tape this to the wall · 18 items

The 18-item afternoon

Top to bottom. Don't launch with any items unchecked. The order is the order — photography lead-time is the only thing that should be running in the background from day one.

Market memo filed and approved. Population, incumbents, three named sponsors.
Property name chosen and run past legal. No trademark conflicts on "City.Suffix".
Domain registered: city.scoop / city.guide / cityname-insider.com as available.
Signature color drawn from the slot board. CSS token committed.
Wordmark typed in Fraunces. Three SVG sizes exported. HTML version pinned as canonical.
Subdomain stood up on the platform. subdomain.lightbreak.app.
Hairlines & rules visually QA'd against the parent property. They should be identical.
Masthead stripe in the signature color, 4 px height, top of every page.
Active nav indicator set to signature color in tokens.

Kicker copy list — first ten kickers drafted, anchored to local neighborhoods.
Photo brief written, stringer hired, fifty-frame starter set delivered.
Local editor hired and onboarded on the voice guide ( Ch. 09 ).
Three founding sponsors signed. Premier partner stripe slot filled by launch.
Weather widget pinned to the right zip code.
Ticker feed sources confirmed ( three minimum: city hall, school board, weather alerts ).
Comments policy inherited verbatim from parent. No local edits to the rules.
Disclosure footer updated with the property name and city.
Soft-launch readers: 50 local insiders email-invited a week before public launch.

§ 5.8

When NOT to spin up a new property

The instinct is wrong more often than it's right

Don't

Saying no to a property is harder than saying yes. Here are the moments where no is the right answer.

Don't spin up a property to chase a single advertiser. One sponsor isn't a market.
Don't spin up a property in a market with a strong, well-run local-news incumbent. Compete by being better, not by being there.
Don't spin up a property until a local editor is named. Without an editor, you're publishing wire copy in a cream wrapper.
Don't spin up a "WilCo.Schools" or "WilCo.Politics" — that's a section, not a property. Tier 4 demographic titles are real properties; sections are not.
Don't spin up two properties in the same metro with the same suffix. Round Rock.Scoop and Cedar Park.Scoop are fine. Round Rock.Scoop and Round Rock.Guide are not.
Don't spin up a property whose only available signature color is a re-use of an existing assigned slot. The signature color is the fingerprint. Two properties with the same one is a problem.
Don't spin up an international property without three local sources in the byline pool. Distance corrodes credibility fastest.
Don't spin up a property faster than once a quarter. The bottleneck isn't design — it's editor sourcing and sponsor sales. Honor the bottleneck.