The studio runs on a fixed 12-week cadence for system engagements. Every project follows the same shape — diagnose, construct, system, hand-off — but the depth at each phase scales with the engagement tier. Below: the schedule, plotted.
Two weeks before we draw a single line. Eight to twelve stakeholder interviews — the founder, the senior team, three customers, two former employees, sometimes a competitor. We're trying to find the company that already exists, not invent a new one.
The diagnose phase ends with a written positioning brief — 8 to 12 pages — that you and your team approve before we touch a pencil. If we can't agree on the company in writing, we won't agree on the mark in pixels.
Four weeks of construction. We deliver three distinct logo directions — each drawn on a documented grid, each with a written rationale, each tested at four scales from 8px to 30 feet. We present construction, not chrome. No mockups on hoodies. No moody phone wallpapers.
The reasoning matters more than the rendering at this phase. If you can't defend the geometry to a board member, the mark will get redrawn the second the wind shifts.
The chosen mark expands. Four weeks of building everything that lives around it: a type system with display, workhorse, and UI tiers; a color token system audited for contrast across light and dark surfaces; a photographic direction; motion principles handed off as Lottie samples to your engineers.
This phase is also where we stress-test against deployment. The mark gets applied to a vehicle, a 30-foot façade mockup, a business card, a 64-pixel app icon, and an embroidery patch. If it fails any of those tests, we revise.
Two weeks of documentation. The 60-page guideline gets bound, the asset library gets uploaded to your DAM, and your team comes to the studio for a half-day training session — including the marketing lead, the in-house designer if you have one, and your printer.
For 90 days post-launch we're on standby. Every print job, every campaign, every new sub-brand request comes through us for review. We don't bill that 90-day window — it's how we make sure the system actually adopts inside the company instead of dying in a Dropbox folder.