Can you express the idea of "graceful technology" in a logo?

Sulava

Wired-mag meets Martha Stewart in a logo.

We are a consultancy that helps companies transform their business into the digital era.

Basically, this is what we do: First we ensure that our customers have a clear-cut vision of the future of digital work. Then we help them choose the best technology platforms, products and service providers. Then we supervise the needed ict-projects so that everything goes smoothly. Lastly we take care that the whole organization buys in the change.

So we do no coding or sell no products. We serve as a independent layer above both the big ict-service providers like SAP, IBM and smaller product companies like Dropbox, Evernote and help our customers build a truly effective work environment that increases motivation and productivity.

This quote sums up pretty well the problem that our customers are facing:

"When a 12-year-old can gather information faster, process it more efficiently, reference more diverse professionals, and get volunteer guidance from better sources than you can at work, how can you pretend to be competitive? Hack work, and embrace the others in your midst who care enough to do so."
- Thomas Friedman, The DIY Economy, New York Times, December 2009

Tag words for this project:
hacking work, agile development, cloud computing, future office, social technology, smart systems, seamless services, crowdsourcing, productivity

We target Fortune 500 companies and typically deal with their Chief Executive Officer, Chief Information Officer, Human Resources Manager or Communications Manager. So the focus is not on only the "techies" in the companies but on a more general, maybe humane level.

Our name "Sulava" is a finnish word and it translates to graceful or fluent. So the main challenge here is to find a way of combining the ideas of "gracefulness" and "technology" in one design.

From a style perspective, we're looking for our logo to be simple and clean. The feel should be reliable and friendly (but not cutesy or playful). We are open to different colours, lower/uppercase, serif or sans.

- The ideal logo is typeface only, no icons. Find a simple, classic, elegant way to express our core idea. So no icon is required. We suggest you first work on the font and if you get a 3-5 star rating for your work only after then think if an icon would make your design even better.
- Don't add any taglines, trademark signs etc. to your design. Just the work Sulava.
- Don't use any 3D-effects, shadows or the like in your initial design. You can experiment with those later if we like your basic idea.
- The design should work well in only black&white.
- Take a look at a few logos of companies that work partly in the same field as we do (file attached). Designwise we are looking for something that is as simple but has a bit differentiating feel to it.

The logo should be flexible enough to be used for dark or white backgrounds, reversed-out.

The files we will require are:
- Print file format - .ai (CMYK)
- Web file format - .jpg and layered .psd (RGB)