Why our name is in all caps

My full name is Edward Kaufholz III. I almost never use the numeral. It comes out when something counts, like the stack of papers you sign to buy a house. Still, it’s the one part of my name that’s only mine.

It’s also hiding in our name. Look at the middle of PILLAR: three upright strokes standing side by side, like the III after my name. That’s where the name came from, and it’s why we always write it in capitals, even when it looks like we’re yelling.

I wanted the name to work like a signature.

Everything that goes out our door has to be something I’m proud to sign.

That goes for every email, every social post, and every paycheck I get to sign for a contractor.

I started PILLAR with barely enough money to get going, so I made our first logo in Canva. I wanted it to look like the gold leaf lettering on an old barbershop or mechanic’s shop, where things are made by hand for the person in front of you. That’s still the idea behind PILLAR: everything starts from a blank page for one organization, never from old work or a template. It’s why our first tagline was “bespoke creativity,” the right idea in words that were a little too pretentious.

That logo carried us for two years. But a brand has to grow up with the business behind it, and what served us then doesn’t serve us now. The old logo fit a company running on a shoestring, and it looked homemade, because it was.

There’s a time for homemade, and there’s a time to bring in a professional.

So I went to Ashley Purser, a brand designer with a thriving career of her own who shares her expertise with PILLAR from time to time. Her work pleases my eye, and it’s smart and elegant, too. She’s brave enough not to always give me what I ask for and wise enough to give me the design I need.

I told her the story of the name and asked for capitals that didn’t yell. I gave her no direction on color, because I was hiring an artist. Mostly, I wanted something people who are nothing like me would want to wear. The story found its way into her sketches, down to a P standing on three strokes and the Roman numeral itself.

Then her options came in, and I finally understood what the people we work with feel when the work is this personal. All day I give quick, constructive feedback on other people’s work. This time I was the client, my name was on the line, and I was paralyzed.

I did what I’d tell anyone in my seat to do and took the options to a group of friends. The room kept coming back to two pieces from two different options: an italic PILLAR that leans forward and an art deco column.

Ashley also gave us something I didn’t know we needed: a mark. I had assumed everything would just say PILLAR, and I had no idea what to put in the little circle on an Instagram profile, a browser tab, or the bottom of a strategy document. The column fits all of them. She paired it with the word, and we worked through the lockups until we landed here.

She chose the colors, too. Pine, Tangerine, and Matcha don’t stand for anything, and that’s on purpose. Ashley picked them because she’s a great artist and they’re beautiful together, and they’re far more clever and sophisticated than my mechanic’s-shop gold and brown. The colors and the logo had to work for every kind of organization we serve, and look just as at home on a contract as on a cool piece of merch. And they make me happy. I like wearing them.

So now, whether it’s the little column at the bottom of a page or the whole word across the top, I’m signing it, and so are the contractors who share PILLAR with me. What started as a nod to the suffix on my name has become a shared mark we all sign our work with.

As a creative, communications, and marketing agency, we meet a lot of organizations right where I was. They already have great writers, designers, and strategists. What they need is someone to help them level up. I needed that, too. In part two, I’ll show you how Ashley did it.