After eight years in the business of local newsletters — and now with 28 markets across the United States — 6AM City has released its first Brand Guidelines. The Guidelines provide robust documentation that ensure consistency, build trust, and support brand recognition for all of our markets across the country. They also provide critical flexibility, ensuring that individual markets can stay true to local preferences.
So what made it into our Guidelines — and what was the creation process like?
Getting to the why
The Guidelines are broken into sections, laid out simply and in an easy to understand format. These sections are: Defining Our Brand (Brand Anthem, Differentiators, Values, and Voice), Grammar Standards, Design Elements (including logos, colors, icons and shapes, illustrations, and typography), and Governing Principles. First and foremost, the Brand Guidelines ensure consistency in our products internally and externally.
Internally, the Guidelines support training and can be folded into the onboarding process, helping new team members get up to speed on processes quickly. Clients working with 6AM now also have a centralized resource that will help them understand our products and design standards, supporting the seamless integration of their offerings with our brand look and feel.
“Customers respond to consistent usage of branding over time,” VP of Marketing Liam Whalen said. “Placements ranging from the web, our newsletters, social media, and ad content resonate at a higher level because people recognize things as our brand.”
As a media company, grammar and written editorial guidelines are a core part of 6AM’s brand. The lighthearted and positive tone that helps define the brand carries through everything, including subtler elements like punctuation choices (yes, we are Oxford comma people).
Creative Director Dalton Anderson, who provided insight into the language and content recommendations, facilitated collaboration between teams to create the guidelines, and designed and formatted the content into a clear, digestible flow. “Everything comes down to our brand anthem and key differentiators,” Anderson said. “While we could simply offer a guide for creating something ‘on brand,’ we wanted to go one step further and emphasize the ‘why’ behind what we do. Our brand anthem speaks to our culture, mission, voice, values, and more, all in a few carefully crafted paragraphs.”
Timelining — and streamlining
The process of creating Brand Guidelines took some time and began with conversations between Anderson and 6AM City’s executive leadership. “The company has changed drastically” since those early discussions, Whalen noted, “including adapting new tech platforms that changed the product’s look and feel, as well as our own updates to the look and feel of the brand.”
The team spent months and reviewed many iterations as they worked collaboratively on the Guidelines, ensuring that they would effectively represent the company externally. Much of the process depended on streamlining. For example, each market initially had its own, individual brand colors. As part of the streamlining process, the team selected five base colors to make production easier and more consistent as the company scaled. “Consolidating down to one key color swatch was a major effort the creative team had to address pretty broadly,” Whalen said. “We needed to make sure every asset we had on every channel — from social media posts to Canva templates and typography — worked on each one of our platforms, as well as everyone’s inbox across different email services. Everyone has their own backend tech, and our look and feel has to be consistent across that, and friendly enough that it will be delivered.” The team checked for this consistency by sending email tests on every email system in use today.
Another key challenge — and an integral step in the branding process — came when the newsletter tech stack shifted from Wordpress to Brightspot. “We had our brand colors, look, and feel, but we had to ensure that things were properly integrated and solidified,” Whalen said. “We had multiple style guides in separate locations that we had to consolidate as part of the transition to Brightspot. It also just shifted our entire approach on how things were going to look and feel.” The team also streamlined guidelines around written content, keeping processes clear and simple.
For Anderson, the document is less about design dos and don’ts and more “how we talk and the values that keep us going. Everything in the guide is designed with scalability and growth in mind. This adaptability means that as we grow and change as a brand, our guidelines can act as a compass, helping us stay true to the core mission of 6AM,” he says. “Our brand guidelines shouldn’t be set in stone, but should grow and adapt alongside our brand. It’s all about staying positive, flexible, and responding with agility as 6AM evolves.”
“We are currently in a very solid place to create these guidelines overall,” said Whalen. “It’s been a long time coming, and now we feel comfortable saying ‘Here is who we are as a brand.’ We’ve emerged from the scrappy startup space and into a more sophisticated business over the last few years, and this is evidence of that.”
Local everywhere
The Brand Guidelines must ensure consistency, but they must also be flexible enough to support the hyperlocal nature of our products. Our newsletters are produced by local teams embedded in our cities, meaning each must feel authentic and resonate with its local audience.
“This is different from any other brand guidelines I’ve worked on,” said Whalen, who has had extensive prior experience. “Each market has its own version of what works, and what resonates in Boston won’t work in Austin. We need to make sure the content is consistent, but we must cater to the hyperlocalized product.” That means that each market has a slightly different look and feel.
“When people sign up for our products, they understand what they will get on a daily basis,” Whalen shared. “We want our brand to be something people resonate with daily. We won’t start using random fonts or integrating off-brand visuals. We’ll have that purity. In this world of mass consumption, we want our users to see our brand and products and resonate with us as a true and trusted source of information, always pushing the positive and sharing fun local things you wouldn’t know about from a nationally-based company.”
When more users resonate with our products as trusted sources, there is a measurable positive effect on advertisers and revenue, drastically increasing the overall lifetime value of a user.
“Right from the start, we make it clear that we stand apart from traditional media,” said Anderson. We don’t resort to fear tactics or vie for our audience’s attention; instead, we dedicate ourselves to aggregating and curating the most exciting, positive, and engaging local content from all sources into a bite-sized daily read. This ensures our audience is always in-the-know about all things local, without being burdened by divisive or click-bait content. We’re reviving local news and making it fun.”
“The end goal of everything we’re doing is for our users,” said Whalen. “Our demographics are consistent over time, but everyone doesn’t live the same life. With the Brand Guidelines, we want to make sure we’re being local. At the end of the day, that’s what we are.”