Brand guides
What is settled, what is still open, and the rules any mark has to clear. Written down so the decisions survive the conversation they were made in.
Settled
From the team repo. These are decisions, not proposals.
- Brand word is Pause. The event is The Pause Summit. thepausesummit.com is ours.
- Two days, twelve clinicians, free to attend, with a 48 hour replay. Amy hosts.
- The program is The Pause Program at $1,000 and $2,000, built on the P.A.U.S.E. Method. Community is $29 a month on Circle. VIP pass is $97.
- Tagline is “We are heard.” It sits beside the mark, never inside it. Heard was dropped as a brand name on 6 October and survives only as the line.
- Two lockups have to work: The Pause Summit, and The Pause Program · The PAUSE Method. Any mark that cannot take a descriptor line is out.
Still open
Nobody should act as though these are decided.
- The mark. Nothing has been chosen. Roughly fifty directions explored.
- The palette. Bone, ink and clay were rejected. Clay was burnt orange, which is Haver’s territory, so moving off it was right regardless.
- The typeface. Work Sans is a placeholder. It is Grüns’ own face, fine to think in, wrong to launch in.
- The trademark screen. Owed before anything reaches Amy, Adrienne or BioStation. USPTO moved its API behind a free key on 2 October.
The category, and why it constrains us
A full audit of the menopause field found the whole category sitting in two type camps. One is high contrast fashion serif in lowercase: Alloy, Versalie, Stripes, Balance, Womaness. The other is wide tracked geometric sans in capitals: Kindra, Joylux, Evernow, Pause Well-Aging, the Midlife Summit. Landing in either one makes us furniture.
The category’s favourite device is punctuation. Haver’s apostrophe is her entire icon and her favicon file is named Apostrophe_Icon. Pause Well-Aging uses three dots. Versalie and the Menopause Society use a period. All of it is unavailable to us.
Dr. Mary Claire Haver owns the word
The ’Pause Life, seven million followers, two New York Times bestsellers, a clinic, a supplement line and a podcast called unPAUSED. She is the biggest brand in the category and she already has the word three times over.
Our mark cannot be mistakable for hers. Any echo is dead on arrival, and that includes warm orange, which is the colour of her icon.
Banned outright
Twenty-two motifs came out of the audit. These are the ones that keep getting proposed.
- An apostrophe or open quote as the icon. Haver’s entire favicon.
- PAUSE in wide tracked capitals. Both existing Pause marks do exactly this.
- Two vertical bars, the pause button. A play triangle is the Midlife Summit’s icon.
- A looping or circular arrow. Evernow, by Pentagram.
- A word revealed inside a word by tint or weight. It dies at 16 pixels and cannot be embroidered. This kills the menoPAUSE direction in the repo: the idea is good, the execution is not.
- Hot pink or magenta. The Midlife Summit already owns a pink field with a mark on it, and they run their event next month.
What a mark has to survive
Tests, in the order they kill things.
- A Meta ad thumbnail. The number one application. Anything that only works at display size is not a mark.
- 240, 120 and 64 pixels wide. Trimmed and set at each, upscaled with no smoothing so mush is visible.
- The icon alone at 16 pixels. The favicon is the icon, not the word.
- One colour, and reversed. If it needs two tones it fails.
- Both descriptor lockups, without the type colliding.
- The swap test. Put a competitor’s name in it. If it still works, it is not ours.
How the mark gets finished
Five things, taken from how real identity work is presented. A mark is never shown alone.
- Drawn on a construction, not by eye. A grid, a stated radius, a ratio.
- The explorations shown, not just the winner, so the choice reads as decided.
- Set against the category, since we have no history to show a lineage against.
- The reasoning written down. The constraint and the problem solved, not adjectives.
- A named human credited. Ana draws the final vector.