Wyatt, Underwood & Grasheim

The wordmark

Three surnames, set as three lines so no one of them has to shrink to fit. The comma and the ampersand do the work of ranking the names, and the rule underneath ties the tagline to the block instead of leaving it floating.

Primary wordmarkUse this unless the space will not take it

On paper#0F0E0D on #F2F1F0

Reversed#F2F1F0 on #0F0E0D

The tagline, settled

The delivered stacked lockup read Trial Lawyers while both alternates read Attorneys at Law. Attorneys at Law wins, so the stacked mark has been reset to match using its own drawn letters. Every file now says the same thing.

The symbol

The four initials squared off inside a rule. It exists because the wordmark cannot survive a favicon, a lapel pin, or a profile circle, and because a firm needs something that reads as itself from across a lobby.

Primary symbolSquare, 1:1

ReversedHolds at 24 px

Apart, never together

The wordmark and the symbol are one system, not one lockup. Both already spell the firm out, so setting them side by side says the name twice and halves the size of each. Choose the one the space is shaped for.

RightWordmark alone, wide space

RightSymbol alone, square space

WrongLocked up as one mark

The alternate

One more setting, for the shapes the primary will not fit. It is an alternate, not an option: reach for it because the space demands it, not because it looks like a change of pace.

Variation 2, single lineLetterhead, site header, anything wider than 90 mm

Variation 2 drops the comma and separates the names with hairlines, which reads as an index rather than a sentence. It is the only alternate the firm keeps.

The letterforms

The wordmark is not typed, it is drawn. Set the same word in the nearest released Garamond and the edits show up straight away: the fitting is six percent tighter, the serifs are cut to sharp wedges rather than the soft bracketed entries of the original, and the apex of the A comes to a point.

GRASHEIM

Cormorant Garamond SemiBold, untouched

Drawn for the firm

GRASHEIMsix percent

Superimposed and aligned on the G. Everything holds until the tail, and the tail is the whole difference.

Cormorant is released under the SIL Open Font License, which is what makes a modified cut legitimate rather than borrowed. The firm owns the drawing outright, it can be extended, and there is nothing to license.

The character set

These are the characters the marks themselves use. Everything that is typed rather than drawn is set in TWK Ghost, whose full set is in hand: fourteen styles, every character the firm needs, and the same wedge serif as the wordmark, which is why the two sit together without argument.

Colour

The firm said it did not care about colour, which is the right instinct and also a decision. Two grounds and one accent means nothing has to be approved twice, and the mark never depends on a colour to be recognised.

Ink#0F0E0DThe mark, headlines, and every dark ground. Warm rather than pure black, so it does not go blue next to newsprint.

Paper#F2F1F0The default ground. Off-white, so reversed artwork does not glare and photographs sit down into the page.

Blue#2F5FD0The single accent, and it only ever marks what a visitor is meant to press. Lifted to #597FD9 on the ink ground, where the base is too dark to read. Never the mark itself.

Rule#DBDAD9Hairlines and table dividers. It is the only thing that separates one section from the next.

Paper and Rule sit almost on top of each other, which is why the band above runs edge to edge. That closeness is the point: the page is built out of one warm neutral, and the only real contrast in the system is the mark itself.

Room and floor

Both rules come out of the artwork itself rather than a round number. Clear space is the height of the W. Minimum size is whatever keeps the small capitals under the name from closing up, which is the first thing to fail when a logo gets shrunk into a footer or a sponsor row.

Nothing sets inside the dashed line. Not rules, not photographs, not the edge of the page.

The symbol repeats the margin already built into its frame, which lands within a hair of the same unit.

Smallest usable	Print	Screen
Primary wordmark	50 mm	220 px
Variation 2, single line	90 mm	430 px
Symbol	10 mm	24 px

Variation 2 is the one to watch. At 90 mm it will not fit across a business card, which is the reason the stacked wordmark stays primary and Variation 2 stays a header and a letterhead lockup.

On paper and on screen

The system earns its keep in the places nobody art directs: a card handed across a table, a letter that has to look like the firm before anyone reads it, a circle beside a name in an inbox. Each of these uses one mark, at the size that mark was built for.

Card, front

Elena Grasheim

Partner

El Paso, Texas

Card, back. Wordmark at 50 mm, the floor from the previous plate. Telephone and email to be added once the firm confirms them.

Letterhead. Variation 2 runs the full measure, which is the one place its width is an advantage.

Avatar and favicon. The frame is the first thing to close up, so 24 px is the floor. 20 px is here to show what that looks like.

Elena Grasheim

Partner, Wyatt, Underwood & Grasheim

Email signature. The symbol stands in for the wordmark wherever the space is shorter than it is wide.

The website

A logo is judged in the place people actually meet the firm, and right now that place is a Townsquare Media template. This is the same identity carried through to a homepage: the drawn wordmark in the header, one accent, and a page that behaves like a firm that tries cases.

It is a working page, not a picture of one. Open it, scroll it, resize it. If the firm wants this built out properly, the identity above is already the design system it runs on.

Open the homepage