For our first six years we presented three routes at every identity milestone. Everyone does it. Clients expect it. It feels generous — look how much work we did for you — and it de-risks the meeting, because if one route lands badly there are two more behind it.
It is also, we eventually admitted, a way of not making a decision.
What three routes actually produces
If you have four weeks and three directions, each direction gets a week and a bit. None of them is developed far enough to show what it would really be like. You are presenting three sketches and asking someone who does not do this for a living to imagine the finished version.
What happens next is predictable. The client picks elements from all three. The type from route one, the color from route two, the logo from route three. Individually each choice is defensible. Together they are not a design — they are a committee.
Three routes moves the hardest decision from the people who have spent four weeks thinking about it to the people who have spent forty minutes.
The uncomfortable version
We now present one direction. We spend the whole four weeks on it, we develop it far enough that you can see what it would be like in the world, and we come with the reasoning written down.
And then we argue about it. That part matters:
- We explain why, not what. The presentation is mostly about the decisions, not the artefacts.
- We show what we rejected. Not as polished routes, but as the actual working — so you can see the road not taken.
- We will change it for a good reason. A reason, not a preference. "I do not like green" is a preference. "Our biggest competitor owns green" is a reason.
What it cost us
We lost two pitches in the first year to studios who promised more options. We also had one genuinely bad meeting where the single direction was wrong and we had nothing to fall back on, which was humiliating and correct — we had misread the brief and three routes would only have hidden that for another fortnight.
What we gained is that the work ships closer to what we designed. Identities that survive contact with a marketing team, because the system is coherent rather than assembled.
If you want to try it
Say it before you are hired, not after. Put it in the proposal, explain the reasoning, and let people opt out. The clients who want three routes genuinely want three routes, and you will both be happier if they hire somebody else.
