Branding Stride: What’s Behind A Logo?

It took us about two weeks to agree to a name for Stride; it look less than two hours for the logo. The naming process was tough, but by the end of it we had such a strong shared vision there wasn’t much room for disagreement throughout the rest of the process.

We all agreed we wanted a relatively straightforward wordmark to support our brand value of simplicity. I also knew we’d need some sort of secondary icon for social media avatars, mobile app icons, and secondary applications. 

While perusing typefaces (glass of single malt Scotch in hand, as all with all fine design), I quickly settled on SugarPie. It’s friendly and approachable, but what really sucked me in was the fantastic sense of motion it has. The lean and flow seemed made for the word stride. 

                                                 

From there, it was as easy a logo design process as you’ll ever see. I spent an hour tweaking and customizing the font to make it our own and tighten things up. I knocked out a few concepts for the secondary icon, got feedback from the whole team, and by the time is was time to queue up a new album on Rdio, we had our final logo.

You might like the logo; you might not. The more important thing, though, is that it communicates a lot about Stride as a company. It embodies our values of friendliness, positivity, and simplicity. 

Branding Stride: The Name

When you’re creating a company, you’re going to screw up a lot of things—some of them badly. The one thing you make sure you get right (after choosing your co-founders) is the name.

Think about it. The average lifespan of a website design is in the ballpark of three years, and usually less for startups. The lifespan for a logo is, at best, two decades. Even iconic logos like Ford, ATT, and General Electric evolve over time. But Ford has been named Ford since 1903. 

Changing your name isn’t impossible, but it is hard, and it can create a lot of confusion. 

This seems like an appropriate place to interject a disclaimer: I’m not what most people would consider a branding expert. I’m not going to give you tips on how to name your company; I’m only going to talk about why we named ours what we did. (If you want to know what to name yours, consider reading 17 Mutable Suggestions for Naming a Startup by the inestimable Dharmesh Shah.)

So. Back to Stride. It wasn’t always called that; the working title of the project for much of its early life was Aqueduct, a sort of cheeky allusion to the concept of a sales pipeline. There are worse names out there, but it was problematic. It’s a little weird. It’s tricky to spell. And we knew we wanted the product to be inviting, and vague puns about Roman engineering might not be the best way to achieve that. More than anything, we knew we could find something better.

We discussed at least fifty possibilities over a few weeks, and nothing was right.

Dabble? Sounds amateurish. Huntr? Too aggressive. MinimalTrack? Too long, too literal. Modest? Doesn’t communicate anything about our product. 

By the end of the process, Andrew was about ready to kill me. I don’t blame him. Every day he came up with a handful of new ideas, and every day I found a reason why none of them would work.

Finally, we really took some time and refined and codified what we wanted from the name and the brand: friendly, positive, purposeful. It was a reaction to our personal experiences with sale tracking, which had been frustrating exercises that felt like busy work. (We need to talk about your TPS reports…)

With those three words in mind, we had clear criteria to evaluate any potential name. The very next day, Andrew texted me just one potential name: Stride. 

I loved it then, and I love it now. It feels so natural for the product build, I can’t imagine it being called anything else.

The one lesson I keep learning again and again (and always the hard way) is that strategy is key in design, and particularly in branding. Until everyone in the room agrees on where you’re going, no one is going to agree when you get there.

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