Telling Our Own Story

Here at Beutler Ink, we like to say that “we find your story and help you tell it.” This spring, we’ve been thinking a lot about our own story and the best way to tell it, as we’ve grown our team and expanded our services to add visual storytelling as our second core offering, alongside our unique “wiki relations” services. A big part of telling our own story has been finding a logo to go with our new services and company name. A company’s logo communicates, through an icon and as few words as possible, the ethos of a brand. And since we’re helping other companies tell the stories of their brands, we wanted to be damned sure to get ours right.

Developing a brand identity is even more challenging when you’re adding a new type of service to what you’re best known for. We needed an identity that fully captured both our writing and research work on Wikipedia, while also pointing to our new creative offerings.

That’s why we pulled in the guys at Scrap Labs to help us develop a logo. They’re experts at asking the kinds of questions that let them turn intangibles into the universal language of symbols. Some of the questions you might expect, like: “What emotions does the brand what to communicate to its audience?” But others, like: “How would the brand interact at a party?” help them really capture the essence of a brand and then distill it into something concrete. You can see a bit of what their process looks like in the image above.

We think our new name and the logo for it developed by Scrap Labs do an amazing job of capturing what we’re all about. They’re literal, in some sense—the pen nib reflects both our writing work with Wikipedia and our visual design services, and ink is certainly appropriate for both writing and art.

But both the pen and the use of the word ink are metaphorical, too. With our team members in a number of different cities in the U.S. and beyond, everything we do is digital—from initial brainstorming to final deliverables. Our articles never touch paper, nor our art canvas. Hell, most of us can’t even find a pen when we need one.

And we’re not afraid to admit that we’re a bit old school. We like the aesthetic of pens and ink and the 4,000-odd years of creativity they represent. It’s that creativity that’s really at the heart of Beutler Ink. Whether we’re writing for Wikipedia or designing visual content, pens and ink evoke who we are—writers and artists. Storytellers.