Alphabet Arm Design News

A short time ago, one of our existing clients — who shall remain nameless at this time — asked us to create a mascot to use as a secondary branding tool for their I.T. company. We proposed a short list of possible directions that included an otter, a mongoose, a robot, a crime fighter and several other quirky choices. Of course, the robot was the winner (because robots are the best… duh). We wanted to make her a lady robot (or “Shebot” as we’ve been calling her around the studio) to give a twist to the typical notion of a retro tin robot. She’s smart, a bit sassy and she’ll fix your computer in the blink of an eye.

Here is a quick look at the process that made her the robot she is today. As you can see, the smirk gives her just the right bit of attitude.

Through the process, we also developed this crime fighting super hero. She didn’t make the final cut, but we were really excited with how she turned out. In other words, we couldn’t bear to see her fade away into the logo graveyard without showing her to the world.

We had the dubious privilege of working with the team at Flea Marketing before re-branding them. So, we had a solidified sense of what they would respond to visually. The Brooklyn based company makes it impossible for indie retail to not pay attention to new releases. Their clients include legendary labels such as Dangerbird, Barsuk, Warner Bros. + Vapor. Two of Alphabet Arm’s intern army (Matt Kaiser + Laurie Mildenhall) expertly crafted the new logo and business cards. The new branding features some severely compromised typography, a (bit-too-life-like) flea and some custom illustration tying the system together.

Check Flea Marketing out on the Facebooks and follow their Tweetifications.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt contacted Alphabet Arm to design a simple, yet flexible logo to be consistently used for their series of books, Good Sports (not to be confused with Good Sport).

Prolific sports writer Glent Stout’s new series for middle-grade readers focuses on the careers of trailblazing ballplayers, professional athletes who serve in the military, and female sport pioneers.

Special props to the talented Laurie Mildenhall for shooting these for us.

Woo Hoo! We are always stoked when someone takes the time to write about the studio or review our work. Recently, The Tee Gazette posted a very nice piece about us. The Tee Gazette reviews a boatload of apparel companies and designers who specialize in apparel design, so yeah, it’s pretty sweet. We recently got turned onto the site after one of our clients, Invisible Sun, had some of their shirts reviewed. We were so inspired, we worked up this lovely t-shirt design!

We came up with this squid illustration a few years back in honor of our shared affinity for anything inky. He hadn’t seen the light of day for quite some time, so we thought we’d bring him out of the deep to live on your very own desktop.

What are you waiting for? Get started downloading! You can either right click and then “Download linked file” or control-click to do the same.

Download the squid. You’ll receive a zip file containing the following desktop resolutions:

2560 x 1440
1920 x 1080
1280 x 720
1280 x 800

Here is a first look at a branding project we are currently finishing up. “Know the Signs, Know Sepsis” is a campaign for the Boston Medical Center to increase awareness of the life threatening condition of severe sepsis. As a studio, we embrace the opportunity to take on different types of design work and show our range — and who knows, we might even learn something in the process. In addition to the logo design, we also named this campaign. We’ll post a more comprehensive look at the project once all of the posters, pens, pocket cards, notepads and buttons are back from production. Now go eat your veggies.

Sad to say, but this post concludes our series of skate decks as fine art.

This decks was inspired by a book of soundtrack artwork from the 60′s we have in the studio.

After acquiring a couple new typefaces we were all geared up to use, and wanting to work up a whimsical deck to offset some of the slightly more serious directions already completed, this one came about. We also like the play of “for Pete’s sake” to “for Pete’s skate.” We’re just hoping Mr. Sellers would approve. Expertly printed by BoardPusher.

Here is the latest segment of our ongoing series of skate decks as fine art. This one just fell into place and it didn’t even seem like we were trying — a rare (but highly coveted) project where there is very little artistic struggle and it just feels right. It started as a loose pen and ink drawing (see process photo below) and finished with a quick brayer of yellow ink, some zipatone dots and a bit of photoshop. Done and done. Expertly printed by BoardPusher.

Our friends at Amory Group (a marketing agency specializing in social, digital and inbound marketing services) asked us to create an illustration incorporating their logo (which we happened to design a couple years back). Tim Linberg, the founder, described his vision as an old school superhero ripping away his dress shirt to reveal the Amory Group insignia emblazoned across his crime fighting costume. Of course, we covet any project that draws on vintage printed material (especially of the comic book or sci-fi genre) as inspiration. Below is a detail image that depicts the distressing and the mottled texture we developed to create a vintage, golden age look. Also, check out the original pencil sketch we presented before fully rendering the final illustration. This was a fun one to work on and Amory Group seems to think it’s just super.