What We Believe
- Meaning and beauty are one.
- Story is the soul, design is the body.
- Creation without purpose is pollution.
- Design should be illuminating, authentic and strong.
- Design should drive with clarity and dance with ambiguity.
- Ethical branding amplifies truth.
- Magnetic brands are built around real human beings.
- Responsible branding creates far more money than it costs.
- Durable brands never lose sight of why they started.
- Essential brands last decades, not years.
- Values are the health of any culture.
- Life without play is worse than death.
- Detail is the substance of glory.
- God is making all things new.
- Purpose never rusts.
The creative industry is chockablock with brilliant makers and thinkers. But what about their character? What’s it like to work with them? At Steel Brothers, we stand by six values that determine how we work and what you can expect from us.
You love what you do. We love what we do. Kinship is, quite literally, in our dna. We cook up brand names over breakfast and fall asleep thinking about typography. When you hire us, you hire a plot of mental real estate in our brains until the job’s finished.
Love propels us toward the unobtainable ideal. Love ensures symphonic order at the 5,000-foot level, and love drives craftsmanship in the subtlest of details. Now you see it, now you don’t – but it’s always there, always felt by your audience.
Blending in is useful when you’re a lone antelope and a hungry lion catches your scent. In business, camouflage is insanity. You need bold, uncommon ideas to secure a foothold in your market. You don’t need safe. Predictable is forgettable. Boilerplate is fine for contracts, awful for brands.
We started our studio with a strong desire for creative and personal freedom, and our independent spirit infuses every project. We dream with clients in tightly-structured workshops, and then we execute alone. Because we take time to build a creative vision with you, when we deliver the work it’s never a big scary reveal – it’s a big of course.
Were you the kind of kid who always asked why? Same here. We grew up peeking under rocks, exploring hidden nooks, imagining what we might find around the bend or over the ridge, hunting the origin of everything that captured our attention. Looking for Narnia. We never outgrew that curiosity, and we never will.
We’ve spent our entire lives questing for deeper meaning. We break through the surface crust of appearances to find the essence of your brand. And we bring that essence back up to daylight, where it lights minds on fire and sparks action.
The best output in any field comes from people who’ve lived through tight spots and long nights. Who came back stronger and somehow more whole. When you work with Steel Brothers, you get a poet and a soldier in your corner. Two flavors of courage.
We stick to our beliefs and fulfill our promises. When we make mistakes, we own up and make it right. Above all, we’re here to help Outliers find their way. That takes creative leadership, and it takes grit born of experience and hope.
Pretending to be someone else is just too much work unless you’re impersonating Gollum arguing with Sméagol. At Steel Brothers, we aren’t slick or tame. We reject fakery and fluff. We talk straight and practice vulnerability. We accept our imperfections and follow the grain of our design rather than grinding against it.
We encourage others to be themselves, too. We help clients say what they mean by using real, warm-blooded language. You won’t find robot words like actionable, disruptor, moving forward and synergy in the copy we write. That kind of nonsense comes straight from the mouth of Bezuckerbub and we gleefully flick it back to the pit from whence it came.
