We started having weekly meetings so we could stay on track and check off all the boxes that needed to be checked off. We discussed our name, our image and our brand often, but mostly in a high level discussion, not really drilling down to the specifics of the question, "What do we call ourselves?" Then one week we decided it's time to really start answering these questions more specifically. So, we had a brainstorming session with pieces of paper taped on Ryan's dining room wall where we each wrote down our ideas for actual names of our brewery (after making sure the markers didn't bleed onto the wall underneath, of course!). Now we had 30+ different ideas, some still pretty general, some specific. We mulled over these individually, but no one was ever really sold on any of them. The more we tried to label ourselves, the more difficult we found it to really settle on one small set of characters to define our entire business venture. We wanted to convey that we were local in mindset, but not have it sound weird if we hit it bigtime and were able to distribute nationally. We wanted to make sure people knew we were brewing beer, not making park benches. We wanted it to be memorable, but not memorable in the way you remember when your co-worker had a few too many at the office holiday party. On and on our requirements went until we didn't think there was a single combination of numbers and letters available to us with the English language that would accomplish everything we wanted it to.
During this process there were several concepts and several ideas from the original brainstorming session that continued to be brought up. It seemed like every meeting we were discussing the same four or five names and each time we had different arguments for each of them. Who knew naming a company could be so friggin difficult??!!?! Then we stopped talking about it for awhile. We had narrowed it down to a few different options, much more manageable than 30, and we all just sat on them for a couple of weeks. We moved on to different challenges that needed to be addressed more urgently than a name did. After resolving those issues we came back to the name and a funny thing happened. In the time that we took to address other issues and stew privately on the potential name of the brewery we had all come to the same conclusion. We were making it too complicated. We couldn't come to a consensus because we were trying to convey too many different messages with a single phrase. In the end, what mattered is that even though we put it on the back burner and dealt with other issues, one option was clearly more easily recalled than any other. We had finally chosen our name.
Now, how do we display that name? Crap. As I have mentioned in previous posts, we are extremely lucky to have two very talented graphic designers at our disposal. We gave them the name and politely asked them to come up with some logo concepts for us to review. I never probed too much into their development process, but I gather that they both worked on some ideas separately. Then, when they had narrowed down their individual concepts to a dozen or so each, they combined their ideas and began collaborating more extensively to develop an overall design to present us. They were extremely professional in their initial presentation to us. They did not want color preferences to sway us in a particular direction so we first reviewed 7 different primary designs, with a few different font variations of the basic design, all in black and white. Following an almost identical pattern to our struggles coming up with a name, it took us almost a month to decide on a main design. We then asked them to use the main design, but with some different font options. They came back a little later with 8 different fonts for us to choose from (this had been narrowed down from a total of around 48 different options before it even got to us!). We worked a little quicker this time around and were able to come up with 2 that we liked a lot within a week. So, one more meeting and they were kind enough to add a dash of color to our otherwise black and white logo options with the two different font options. In a rare moment of clarity, we were able to actually decide on the final version that night after only reviewing the color/font options for a couple of hours! That is lightning fast compared to the other logo/name decisions we have made!
If you have stuck with me this far (thank you!), I won't tease you any longer. This post really does intend to officially release our name and logo to the public (well, public being those of you reading this blog!). So, without any further explanation, I hereby proudly present:
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