On the elephant.

When I was designing the mark for this studio, I spent a long time going in the wrong direction. I was trying to make something that looked like a brand studio — something that signalled craft and sophistication and good taste. I made marks with letterforms and abstract shapes and geometric compositions that I was genuinely proud of as objects. None of them felt true.

The elephant came from a different place. I wasn't looking for a symbol. I was thinking about what kind of studio I actually wanted to run — what I wanted to be held to, what I wanted to refuse, what I wanted clients to feel when they worked with us. And the thing that kept coming up was this: good brand work doesn't come from cleverness. It comes from memory. From carrying the right things forward and knowing what to put down.

Elephants remember. Not as a cute fact — as a way of being. They navigate by memory of water, by memory of family, by accumulated knowledge that gets passed down. They don't react to every threat. They hold things. They're patient in a way that doesn't look passive. That felt like the right image for what I wanted this studio to be.

We're not a studio that chases trends. We don't rebrand ourselves every eighteen months because a new design era has arrived. We're not interested in making work that looks impressive in a portfolio screenshot but falls apart when it meets the real world. The elephant is a reminder — to us, every time we open our own files — that the work has to hold. It has to carry something real. It has to last.

There's also something about scale that matters to me. Elephants are large and they know it. They don't move frantically. They don't perform urgency. When they move, there's intention behind it. I think about that when we're in a client conversation and someone wants to rush a decision or skip a step because the deadline is coming. The deadline is always coming. That's not a reason to move without intention.

The mark itself is quiet. It's not a literal elephant — it's a compressed form, a presence. Most people who see it for the first time understand it's an animal without being able to say exactly what they're responding to. That ambiguity is intentional. The best brand marks work on you before you understand them. They hold something that explanation only partially captures. That's what I wanted for ours.