It is tempting to begin a brand with sketches of a logo. We begin with a sentence, and we don’t move on until it is right.
A logo can’t tell you what a company believes. It can only carry a belief that has already been decided. When the thinking is skipped, the design ends up doing two jobs at once, and does neither well.
Why one sentence
One sentence is short enough to remember and too short to hide in. It forces choices. You can’t be for everyone, stand for everything and promise it all in fifteen words. Something has to give, and what gives is usually what was never really true.
For Steady, the sentence was built for the return, not the streak. Once it existed, the name, the colours, the words and the product decisions had something to answer to.
How we find it
We listen first: to the people making the thing, to the people using it, and to the people who stopped. We look for the gap between what the category says and what people actually feel. Then we write, cut and rewrite until the sentence sounds obvious. That is usually the sign it is right.
Only then do we draw. And the drawing goes faster, because we finally know what it is for.