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Kearn Freight
Client
Kearn Freight Lines, Commerce City
Industry
Regional logistics
Services provided
Strategy · Identity · Brand system
Delivered
2025
What we found
We spent two days in the yard before we drew anything. The mark had eleven versions in circulation, four of which nobody could source. Drivers referred to the company by the shape of the K, not by the name.
That was the finding worth building on: the letter was already the asset, and the wordmark was the part getting in its way.
They stopped calling to ask which version was the right one. That was the whole point.
Dana Kearn, second-generation owner
What we handed over
A system built around the surfaces that punish: fleet vinyl, powder-coated steel, embroidered workwear, and a fax-quality bill of lading. Each one has a drawn minimum size and a stated tolerance, so the person cutting the vinyl does not have to guess.
We ran a two-hour session with their shop foreman and the sign supplier on the same call. Nothing in the kit needs us to be in the room.
Kearn runs 240 tractors out of Commerce City and had been painting the same wordmark on them since 1998. It was drawn for a sign shop with a vinyl cutter, and every year it lost a little more of itself to the people redrawing it.
What we drew
One letterform, cut so it reads at forty feet and still holds at fifteen millimetres on a bill of lading. The diagonal is a single unbroken cut, which is what lets a sign shop reproduce it in vinyl, in paint, or in stitched thread without asking us for a file.
The wordmark sits beside it, never inside it. On a trailer they are three metres apart.
What changed
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