It all begins with a name,

Except when it doesn’t. Before we had a name, we set out to define an ethos for our firm.

Architects coordinate and manage multiple trades, taking on new knowledge in each project in an effort to deliver a fully coordinated building with its own history, context, and user. As our built environment becomes more and more integrated with technology, architects are learning new trades more than ever before. To be a master of their practice, an architect must be a jack-of-all-trades. We sought to embrace this idea in our ethos, the lifelong pursuit of learning in order to do the best job we can do.

What some people may not know is that Comma Designworks was started with the help of another firm, Carpenter Marty Transportation, a mid-sized Civil Engineering and Transportation firm out of Columbus, Ohio. Carpenter Marty supports Comma with business development and back-end support which frees up Comma to dig in to what we love: Architecture. In pitching the idea of an architectural venture to Carpenter Marty, we created a slide. We listed out Carpenter Marty’s current services while highlighting their newest addition, architecture.

Carpenter Marty was excited to take on a new discipline. This shared vision between our practices stuck in our heads, and eventually brought us back to the idea of “, Architecture.” The comma embodies our desire to take on new challenges, to learn as necessary, to be the best we can be given the context at hand. It allows us to add on, to build on what we are without changing who we are. Every project signifies a new opportunity to become an expert in whatever field that project demands, again and again, one big run-on sentence of experience.

There is also a little story about one night in the bar, trying to figure out what the link to Carpenter Marty and Comma would be without deep diving into ethos. The goals of a long established engineering firm and a new architecture firm are quite different in terms of image and branding. So we dove into their name, and we tried to bridge these ideas together. The comma just kept popping up. Sadly, we don't have the napkin Eric wrote on and asked strangers to try and pronounce, but we've tried to illustrate the idea below along with our favorite image from Carpenter Marty's Brand document.

Lastly, we loved the opportunity for logo design, incorporating the imagery that people already connect with the comma to fit our vision of the brand. We wanted graphic identity that, in the future, the Building Design and Construction industry would recognize without our firm name. On top of it all, “Who’s ever seen a big ass comma like this before?”

We hope you like it.