Rebranding 5Public: Unified Visual System for Media
Olga OKAD
In a world where every media platform is screaming for attention, the ones that don’t invest in brand clarity are doomed to fade into noise. When your network looks like fifty unrelated side projects, no one takes your message seriously.
Those who treat brand unification as “nice-to-have” end up broke, forgotten, and buried under a hundred mismatched logos and Canva templates. Because if you can’t scale your visual identity, you can’t scale your influence — and without that, your media network isn’t growing. It’s crumbling.
The Challenge: One Network, 50 Identities
5Public is a rapidly growing network of 50 regional media outlets. Each operated independently — with its own logo, visual language, and content templates. While this setup worked at a small scale, it became a bottleneck as the brand grew.
The client came to us with three clear goals:
Build a unified visual identity across all 50 publications;
Make it scalable for non-designers and professionals alike;
Preserve the local identity of each city-based channel.
They had already tried to solve this internally, but the decentralized setup and lack of shared design standards made it impossible to align their look and feel across the board.
Step 1: Strategy & Concept Development
We started with research across the entire 5Public ecosystem:
Audit of all existing visual assets from different regions;
Competitive analysis of media brands with a national-local split;
Interviews with stakeholders to understand team workflows and platform limitations.
From this emerged a clear vision: a modular brand system, where each local media outlet retains a piece of its uniqueness, but fits into a broader, instantly recognizable identity.
The Core Branding Solution
The main breakthrough was the logo system. Rather than replacing the local character of each publication, we amplified it using map-based identifiers — each city’s outline became part of its official logo.
We paired this with:
A consistent font and layout system;
A color-coding scheme that helped visually organize regional identity;
Simplified logo variants and watermark versions for cross-platform use.
Step 2: Guidelines & Templates for Scale
Design systems are only as good as their documentation. So we built an ecosystem of guides and toolkits to support daily use:
A full visual style guide, including typography, colors, logo use rules, and layout ratios;
Social media templates (15+ categories) for daily posts, news updates, carousels, and event coverage;
Instructions for working with low-quality imagery (a frequent challenge in fast-moving local news);
Assets optimized for both desktop and mobile editing, including Telegram and VK-specific formats.
We focused especially on enabling non-designers — local editors, marketers, and journalists — to work quickly and confidently inside a unified visual language.
Step 3: Infrastructure for Growth
A crucial part of brand unification is backend clarity. We:
Created 50 individual logo kits, organized by city;
Structured a Google Drive-based asset library, categorized by region and format;
Designed flexible templates that allow rapid adaptation with or without a designer;
Built a media kit template for use with sponsors and partners.
This system reduced bottlenecks, cut down on duplicate requests, and allowed instant onboarding of new regions or staff.
Results
A unified yet flexible brand identity for 50 media channels;
Consistent look-and-feel across VK, Telegram, and internal documents;
Templates used daily by both professional designers and local content teams;
Seamless launch of the rebrand across all cities — completed in under 2 months;
Streamlined external communications with a ready-to-use media kit.
The client now has a scalable visual system that supports daily content creation, partnership outreach, and continued network expansion.
Key Takeaways for Growing Media Brands
Don’t delay brand unification — fragmentation only worsens as your network grows.
Build for real users, not just designers. Your branding system must work for people with zero design training.
Automate and organize your asset delivery — it saves hours and makes scale manageable.
Leverage visual elements to preserve local identity rather than suppress it.
Ready to unify your brand across multiple locations? Give your media network a system, not just a logo.
If your organization is struggling with visual inconsistency, inefficient workflows, or team-level confusion around templates and assets — we can help. Our approach blends strategic branding with operational clarity.
Let’s talk https://tally.so/r/3jElgx
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Posted May 8, 2025
We developed a cohesive corporate identity for 50 publications, including streamlined media kits, organized file management systems, and user-friendly assets.
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Timeline
Jan 20, 2025 - Feb 24, 2025
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