Stonefly Plumbing

Intro

Some names stop you cold. Stonefly Plumbing is one of them.

I came across it on Facebook — a local plumbing company with a name that sits at the intersection of two worlds that almost never meet: fly fishing and plumbing. A stonefly is one of the most important insects in fly fishing, a nymph tied to hooks and drifted through cold mountain streams. It’s also, apparently, the name of a plumbing company. That overlap is rare, specific, and genuinely ownable. The kind of thing a brand identity can be built around.

The problem was the logo they had.

Project Scope

• Deliverables: Logo files and assets (raster & vector), Brand Guide (PDF)
• Tools: Adobe Illustrator (design), Claude (ideation)
• Role: Creative Director, Designer

Finding The Concept

The first instinct with a name like Stonefly is to go overhead view — wings spread, insect silhouette, the obvious read. I explored that direction briefly and set it aside. It was already the territory of the original mark, and the dragonfly shape it defaulted toward wasn’t even the right insect. A stonefly folds its wings flat along its body, torpedo-like, completely different from the spread-wing silhouette everyone reaches for.

More importantly, the overhead view gave me nowhere to put the plumbing reference in a way that felt integrated rather than tacked on.

The pivot was thinking about the mark from a fly fishing perspective specifically — not the insect, but the lure. A stonefly nymph tied on a hook, seen from the side. Profile view. That’s the angler’s perspective, the fish’s perspective, the way the lure is designed to be seen.

Profile view gave me everything:

• A distinctive, less expected silhouette
• A horizontal format that would own a truck door
• A natural place to introduce the plumbing reference
• Motion — the sense of something drifting in current

The concept locked in when I realized the hook and the P-trap are essentially the same shape. A P-trap — the curved drain pipe beneath a sink — follows the same bend geometry as a fishing hook. Swap one for the other and the lure still reads as a lure, but the plumbing reference is unmistakable to anyone who looks twice.

That’s the right kind of concept. You read it as a fly fishing lure first. Then your eye finds the P-trap and does a double take. The discovery sequence is the whole point.

Building the Mark

The process was iterative, working from a simplified silhouette base toward something that could survive every print scenario it would face.

Early versions carried too much detail — wispy hackle fibers, delicate wing strands, body texture that read beautifully at large scale and would disappear completely at an inch wide. The mark needed to be simplified to its essential shapes: the body mass, the segmentation, the bead head, the hackle suggestion, and the tail fibers. Each element reduced to what it needs to be, not what it could be.

The P-trap went through several rounds. The first attempts read ambiguously — too small, the wrong shape, terminating in ways that created unintended silhouette problems. The final version is correctly scaled, maintains a consistent pipe diameter through the curve, and terminates with a flat stub and fitting detail that signals plumbing without explanation. The fitting rings at the connection point between the lure body and the trap are doing real work — they’re the thread/nut detail of a pipe joint, which also happens to reference the thread wrapping of a tied fly.

The mark was rotated clockwise until it settled at a slight natural angle — head lower than tail, the way a nymph actually drifts downstream. That angle gives the mark energy and movement without feeling aggressive.