American Scientific

The original mark was overdesigned in a specific and datable way. A character illustration with a black keyline. A rendered gradient on the body, a prop in the trunk, a hard-edged badge behind it, and the full company name curved around the ring, with two atoms tucked into the border in case the test tube had not made the point. It belonged to the era of design that produced it, and it fell apart at small sizes, which by then was most of where it had to live.

The obvious move was to kill it. That was not on the table. The founder was attached to the elephant, and the attachment had a reason behind it: the company had traded under that mark for a long time. A rebrand that opens by throwing away the one thing leadership cares about does not get approved.

So the elephant stayed and everything around it was reduced. The mark is now a single-value line drawing in one color. No fills. No keyline sitting separately from the art, no rendered gradient on the body, no second ring of type competing with the first. The ornament is still there, quiet enough now to read as texture. I adopted “am-sci” as the shorthand at the same time, which is what the company was already called out loud, and put the weight the old mark spent on ornament into one device: a gradient running red to blue across the letterforms.

I built the full AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC wordmark as an alternative lockup, carrying the same gradient. Some applications want the whole name. Mostly, though, it let leadership see the new system next to the old one and read it as continuity. Showing only the abbreviation would have made the change look bigger than it is.

The mark is not the interesting part of this project. Reducing an overdrawn logo is a known exercise, and any competent designer can do it. The constraint was the problem. Solve for a stakeholder’s real attachment to a specific piece of artwork, and do it without shipping something dated. Those two requirements pull against each other. The work was finding the version that satisfies both.

Product sell sheets, built as a system. Every sheet has the same parts in the same places: the item number, the product shot knocked out in a circle, a short row of feature icons, the description, the what-is-included list, and the line telling the reader to contact their sales representative.

The parts arrive in wildly different states. Some products come with a clean studio shot and a paragraph of copy. Some come with a phone photo and a spec table. The layout has to absorb that without every sheet looking like a different person made it.

Posts for the company's Instagram account, built around an on-this-day-in-history series: a moment from the history of science, illustrated as a single composed image, with the detail in the caption.

It is the one channel here that is not selling a product. The job is to be worth following. The image has to carry the idea on its own, at thumbnail size, in a feed.

Short looping animations for social and for the site: logo builds, animated banners, and posts that move.

All of it has to survive autoplay with the sound off and read inside the first second, because that is the whole of the attention a looping banner gets. The loop point matters more than the animation.