Fieldnote had two thousand paying researchers and a logo the founder had drawn in Keynote. That was not the problem. The problem was that nobody inside the company could finish the sentence “Fieldnote is the tool that…” the same way twice.

We wrote the sentence first

Three weeks of interviews with users, then a fortnight arguing internally about which of the four candidate positions we could actually defend against Notion and a spreadsheet. The winner was narrow and slightly uncomfortable: a tool for people who collect data somewhere with bad signal.

Everything after that was easier. Narrow claims make short briefs.

Then we drew it

A wordmark built from a modified grotesk, a palette taken from surveyor’s tape, and an interface type scale that survives being read outdoors on a cracked phone. The product team shipped the new onboarding six weeks later and conversion tripled.