Honor (2015)Copied

Meebo was an instant messaging company that Google bought in 2012. Its founders had three rules for whatever came next: look a human in the eye and know you could make their life fundamentally better, aim at millions of people and not just one, and pick a hard problem. Then Seth Sternberg saw that his mom was starting to slow down. In 2014 he took the idea of caring for aging adults to Sandy Jen, Monica Lo and Cameron Ring, and the four of them founded Honor.

At first the company had a different name. Sona Labs, Inc. was on the paperwork, and the logo was a thin blue circle with a lowercase sona set in the middle, in a soft, rounded sans. It looked like the icon of a meditation app. That is not the first thing you want to see when you are choosing someone to care for your father.

The new name shows up first in the paperwork. On 6 February 2015 Sona Labs, Inc. filed to trademark HONOR for an app that matches service providers with older and home-bound people.

On 2 April 2015 TechCrunch and Vox reported that Honor had raised $20 million, $15 million of it from Andreessen Horowitz. The service matches screened in-home caregivers with older adults, and a pilot was starting that month in Contra Costa County, California. Nobody has published the day the name changed, so 2 April is the latest date we can prove, not necessarily the first.

The change is total. The thin line became heavy letters, blue became amber and a circle that said app became a plain word. honor is set in lowercase, in heavy, rounded letters with the stem of the h cut at an angle, and a warm amber fills every letter. Nothing is left of Sona except one thing: the lowercase.

Why it mattered, Sternberg told Vox himself: "The number one requirement of me and my co-founders is to look millions of people in the eye and know that we're making their lives fundamentally better." A name that says respect for your parents says that out loud. Sona did not. And amber is warm and a little old-fashioned in the right way, like a lamp left on in the hall. That is our reading of the choice.

The name and the logo were made together. Manual's Tom Crabtree and Caroline Reece worked with Honor's founders Seth Sternberg, Cameron Ring, Monica Lo and Sandy Jen, and with Renato Valdés Olmos, head of design at Honor. Manual is a brand studio based in San Francisco.

The Honor Design team built the rest of the brand inside the company, down to the first brand book. It had 72 pages, was inspired by identity manuals from the 1970s, and had an amber linen cover. The book names amber as the main colour and Fakt Pro, a clean sans serif typeface, as the brand typeface. Designer Leslie Cheng shows it in her portfolio.

Brand designer Joshua Bruner joined the team in March 2015, and Ilana Diamond joined Honor in 2017 as senior brand producer. Product designers Cécile Parker, Olivia Muesse, Emily King, Caleb Duren and Evan Pun built the product side of the brand. Cécile worked on the Care Pro and Family apps.

The logo stayed. By November 2015 Honor's press release on PRWeb was already calling Honor "a new home-care solution", and on 17 December 2015 the company's Medium blog looked back with "A year of Honor". When Honor bought Home Instead in August 2021, its announcement page showed the amber logo next to the Home Instead tulip. That image is the after side above, so you are seeing the drawing as Honor used it in 2021. In 2024 the same letters turned orange, and Home Instead got a new logo.

Honor is easy to say and spell. The name and the colour did their job, for years.