Asking first
I started with a conversation rather than a sketch. What does this team actually do, how do they operate, how do they want to be seen? What concept represented them?
Applying a chess motif
The answer that I got was "strategy." Not the flashy kind, the structural kind. So the mark became a pawn: the smallest piece on the chessboard and the most leveraged, the one good strategy is built around. When playing around with the acronym, I observed that the characters C, S, and E could be arranged into the silhouette of the pawn.
One blue, one typeface
BSC Blue (#003366) and SST. That was the entire toolkit. No secondary palette to reach for, no display face to make it interesting. Anything that solved the problem had to solve it with form, because color and type weren't available as variables.
Selling the thinking, not the file
I presented the whole case rather than the finished logo: what I asked the team, what they said, why a pawn, how the acronym resolved into it. A mark like this dies if the reasoning isn't visible. Handed over cold, it's an abstract shape. Explained, it's an argument the team can repeat about themselves.
