Brand and logo

Describing TFS News

Copy one of these rather than writing your own. Both are current and both are accurate.

Independence and funding

TFS News has no tie to any campaign, party or committee and takes no payment from them. It is privately funded, and funders have no say over what we report. If you are reporting on us and need that stated more precisely, ask at info@tfsnews.co rather than inferring it.

How we source and correct

Every reported fact links to where it came from, and every article ends with a list of its sources. When another outlet broke a story first, we credit it by name and link to its story. Corrections are published as a dated note on the article saying what changed. The full rules are on the Standards page, which is the page to cite if you are describing our practice.

The name

• Write it TFS News, on first mention and after.
• Never spell the letters out. They are not an abbreviation to be expanded in copy, a caption or a chyron.
• Never write TFS on its own in running text, and never set the name in all capitals, as TFSNews, or as tfs news.
• The site is tfsnews.co, lowercase.
• The masthead line is From the Statehouse to your street. It is the only approved tagline. It is not part of the logo artwork and is never typeset inside it.
• Shows carry their own names: Kapture Tha Moment, hosted by Moise. Spelled that way, with that spelling of Kapture and Tha.
• Reporting carries the byline of the reporter who told the story. Stories written at the desk from other outlets' reporting carry the byline TFS News.

Fact sheet

The facts we will confirm on the record. We do not publish audience figures, and we would rather you left a number out than estimated one.

The logo

The logo has two parts. The square mark holds the letters above a gold rule. The wordmark sets the name beside it. Together they are the lockup, and the horizontal lockup is the primary form.

The letters are drawn artwork, not type. They are not Public Sans and cannot be reproduced by typing the name in any typeface. Always place the supplied file.

Which version to use

Clear space

Keep clear space of at least x on all four sides, where x is the cap height of the letters inside the mark. That is one third of the mark's height, and it scales with the logo: at a lockup 300 pixels wide, x is 22 pixels.

Nothing enters that space: no text, no rule, no photograph edge, no other logo, no page trim. More space is always fine. Less is not.

The supplied files already carry a small margin inside the canvas. That margin is part of the artwork, not the clear space, and does not count toward x.

Minimum size

These limits come from the rendered artwork: a ladder at 120, 160, 200, 240, 300 and 360 pixels was read, and 200 is where the lockup still holds together on screen.

If a process cannot hold a hairline, such as coarse newsprint, embroidery or etched metal, go up a size or use the one colour version, where the rule is a knockout rather than a second ink.

By process

The thinnest stroke in the whole lockup is 2.5 units of its 581.5 unit width: the foot serifs under the T and the F inside the mark, which the lockup carries at quarter scale. In the mark's own file those serifs are 9.8 units of 512. Both numbers are read straight from the path data, not estimated from a render: every letter here is built from axis aligned bars, so the stroke is an exact figure in the file. The gold rule, at 4.6 and 18.4 units, and the wordmark's hairlines, at 4.4, are thicker, so neither sets the limit. Vendor minimums vary, so treat the first column as the input to confirm with yours.

This is why stitched and cut work takes the square mark, not the horizontal lockup. A chest embroidery is nowhere near 233 mm wide, but it is comfortably past 52.2 mm, so the mark goes on the garment and the name is spelled out in thread beside it or left off.

Colour

Four colours. Ink and Warm White do the work, Dome Gold marks what matters, Slate carries links and interface.

• Ink#15171A
rgb 21 23 26
cmyk 8 9 7 92Text, the mark, dark surfaces
• Dome Gold#CFA23A
rgb 207 162 58
cmyk 12 31 87 2The rule, accents, panels
• Warm White#FAF7F0
rgb 250 247 240
cmyk 3 4 8 0Paper, reversed type
• Slate#3A5A78
rgb 58 90 120
cmyk 80 54 24 11Links and interface on the site only. Not in the logo, and not in co-branded artwork

Contrast

Measured against WCAG 2.2. The last row is the one that catches people.

On a light surface gold is for rules, borders of three pixels or more, and filled panels carrying Ink type. It never carries words there, at any size: 2.21 to 1 misses even the 3 to 1 that large text is allowed. On Ink, gold carries text at any size.

Print

The CMYK builds above are a conversion from sRGB to U.S. Web Coated SWOP, relative colorimetric with black point compensation. Hand a printer the vector file and these builds, then match the gold against a printed proof before the run. The Ink build is a light four colour black at 8 9 7 92, which holds detail in the mark better than a flat 100 K.

The swatches are also in the kit as tfs-news-colours.ase, which Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop read directly, so nobody has to pick a colour out of a PNG.

Type

The typeface is Public Sans, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. It is free to use, to bundle and to embed, and the files are in the kit. Where it cannot be installed, fall back to Helvetica Neue, then Arial, then the system sans.

The logo is not set in Public Sans and never will be. Do not try to match it by typing the name.

Backgrounds

• On a photograph, use the one colour white lockup, and place it where the image is quiet. If the background cannot be kept quiet, put the logo on a solid Ink band instead.
• On a coloured surface that is neither Ink nor paper, use whichever one colour version reaches at least 3 to 1 against that surface.
• Never place the full colour lockup on a dark surface. The wordmark is Ink and disappears.
• The logo never implies endorsement. Do not place it to suggest TFS News backs a product, a campaign, a candidate or an event.
• To use the marks in a way this page does not cover, ask at info@tfsnews.co first.

Beside another logo

Every figure here is in units of the master file, where the lockup is 581.5 by 160 and the square mark inside it is 128 tall. Multiply by the mark height you are actually using and they all scale.

• Match the mark, not the file. The lockup's canvas is 160 tall but the mark inside it is 128, because the rest is built in margin. Set a partner's square mark to the height of our mark, 128, not to our canvas. Matching canvases makes their mark 25 percent too tall.
• Against a wordmark, match letter heights. Our wordmark's letters are 77 units tall, 60 percent of the mark height. Set theirs to the same and sit both on one baseline.
• Separate by one mark height. That is 128 units, three times the clear space. Clear space is the least you may leave, not the target: at one clear space the pair reads as a single logo.
• A divider goes in the middle of that gap. Make it 4.6 units thick, the same as the gold rule, and the full 128 units tall. Set it in the same ink as the wordmark on that surface, never in gold, so it survives one colour printing, etching and stitching.
• Whoever owns the thing goes first. Left in a row, top in a stack. On anything of ours, TFS News goes first.
• Narrow slots take the stack. Turn the pair vertical with the stacked lockup, keep the same 128 unit gap, and turn the divider horizontal at the same thickness.
• Never put our logo in a box when the others stand free, and never shrink ours below the minimum size for that process just to fit a row.
• Slate is a site interface colour. It has no place in co-branded artwork, a sponsor slide or merchandise: those carry Ink, Warm White and Dome Gold only.

Event screens and stage

Use the reversed lockup on a full bleed Ink field. Gold on a light field is 2.21 to 1 before the house lights are even up, and projector black lift and compression only make it worse. On Ink the name reads at 16.78 to 1 and the mark at 7.60 to 1, and both survive a dimmed room and a compressed feed.

Size it as a fraction of screen height rather than in pixels, so it survives a panel nobody warned you about: at least 12 percent of screen height, and never narrower than 465 pixels. Take whichever is larger.

Keep everything inside an inset of 96 pixels at the sides and 54 at top and bottom on a 1080 field, and scale that inset with the panel. Blanking, keystone correction and panel bezels eat the outer rows, and a logo set flush to the edge is the first thing lost. On a sponsor slide, no gold type anywhere: gold carries structure, never information, so it may be the rule in the mark or a band edge, never a sponsor name or a caption.

Video and lower thirds

In a lower third, use the square mark as a bug and set the name in Public Sans as live text beside it. The horizontal lockup does not go in a lower third: it needs 465 pixels of width to survive compression, a quarter of a 1920 frame. The mark reaches the same standard at 104 pixels, because the same letters are drawn four times larger inside its own canvas.

The band is Ink #15171A, the artwork ink, not the interface ink and not black. The inset and the gold rule are proportions of the frame and scale with it. The minimum sizes are device pixel limits and do not scale down: the bug is still 104 pixels on a 720 timeline.

What not to do

Print and production files

For a printer, a sign shop, an embroiderer or a production desk that needs more than a PNG.

Every vector file is paths only, with no live type and no embedded font, so nothing reflows on another machine.

What is in the kit

Contact

First edition, October 2026. If you are holding a file older than this page, replace it.