Making a mark we could stand behind

For years we designed marks for other people and told them the same thing: the logo is the least interesting part of an identity, so stop treating it like the whole job. Then we sat down to make our own, and discovered how hard our own advice is to swallow.

A family workshop is a strange thing to draw. We are not one discipline. On any given month there is a brand on the bench next to a folding workbench next to a print run of an almanac. Whatever we made had to hold all of that without pretending it was a single tidy service.

The brief we gave ourselves

We wrote it the way we’d write it for anyone: one page, no adjectives we couldn’t defend. Three lines survived the first cull.

• It should read as a field guide, not a tech company.
• It should feel hand-kept — closer to a notebook than a billboard.
• It should still be legible at the size of a browser tab.

That third line quietly killed most of our favourite ideas. A detailed little landscape is lovely at poster size and mud at sixteen pixels.

The constraint that annoys you the most is usually the one doing the real work. Ours was the favicon.

What we cut

We cut the illustrated crest. We cut the custom letterforms — a month of work we were too proud of to notice weren’t actually better. We cut the tagline that tried to explain everything and therefore said nothing.

What was left was almost embarrassingly plain: the name, set in a warm serif, and a horizon of four bands that we could stamp onto anything. Sky, hill, field, earth. It shrinks to a tab without losing its nerve, and it grows to fill a page when we want it to.

The part we’d tell a client

Designing for yourself removes the one thing that normally saves you: a deadline someone else owns. We nearly polished this into oblivion. The rescue was treating ourselves like a client we respected but wouldn’t indulge — a fixed review date, a written brief, and permission to call our own darlings precious.

The mark isn’t finished, exactly. Marks rarely are. But it’s honest about what we are, and we can stand behind it. That turned out to be the whole assignment.