A brand system for Little Labs
Everything below is read out of what Little Labs already owns: the purple in their stylesheet, the condensed face in their headings, the white legend printing on the front panel of every box. Nothing here is invented. It is written down so a printer, an embroiderer, a trade-show builder or an agency can apply it without asking.
The wordmark
An italic geometric grotesk, set solid, in white. It is the same artwork screened onto the front panel of every product, which is the reason the photography can carry the brand without a logo lockup anywhere near it.
Do and do not
Six colours, and one of them is a status light
The purple and the green are already in littlelabs.com's stylesheet as
--accent-hsl
and the button fill on their black sections. Contrast figures are measured against the steel
ground and meet WCAG AA for body text.
The green is load-bearing. On the hardware it means the unit is powered and passing signal. Everywhere else it should mean the same kind of thing: in stock, uploaded, in phase, confirmed. The moment it becomes a highlight colour the hardware metaphor stops working.
Three faces, each with one job
Little Labs already sets headings in Oswald and buttons in IBM Plex Mono. Their body face, Adelle Sans, is Adobe-licensed and cannot be self-hosted, so Archivo carries text at the same industrial-humanist proportions.
The front panel is the brand
Every Little Labs box says what each control does, in lowercase, letterspaced, in white on black. That legend printing is the most recognisable thing the company owns and it is worth using off the hardware as well as on it: section labels, navigation, part numbers, signage, the spine of a look book.
Black steel in a pool of light
Little Labs already shoots every unit dead-on, front and rear, sharp enough to read the legend. That is the right picture. The only change is the ground: the units come off the white card and sit on steel inside a pool of purple light, which is how they look on a bench at two in the morning.
Dead-on, full width, legend legible at 400px. Front and rear, always both.
Real sessions, available light, no styling. Little's own photographs, printed as shot.
Block diagrams keep their white ground. Inverting line art to fit a dark page makes it harder to read, not easier.
Say what the box does and who it was for
Jonathan Little writes the way a tech talks: specific, unhurried, funny when it suits him. The FAQ on littlelabs.com is four hundred words about a Wi-Fi router interfering with a headphone amp, and it is the best writing on the site. Keep that voice. Cut the marketing grammar that sits on top of it.
Three rules
- Lead with the problem. Nobody buys a phase-alignment box from a feature list. They buy it the second time a kick mic and a DI cancel each other.
- Name the room. A&M, Conway, The Village, Cherokee, Don Smith, Toto's 1984 tour. The provenance is the product.
- No superlatives without a measurement. “Audiophile” says nothing. “74 dB of clean gain” says everything.
Rewritten from their current pages
Little Labs products specialize in addressing previously un-addressed audio applications, empowering the audio engineer with new tools, allowing new techniques to explore deeper into the control of sound.
Every Little Labs box started as a favour for an engineer who was stuck. Thirty-eight years of those favours is the catalogue.
The ultimate phase tool – puts you in phase when the polarity button won't.
The polarity button gives you two choices. The IBP gives you every degree between them, while the take is running.
Audiophile sound and construction.
Fully differential from input to output, one active gain stage per channel, and a stepped attenuator you can bypass.
Words to retire
Each of these appears on the live site today. Every one of them can be replaced with the specification it is standing in for.
Where this system goes next
A printed look book for the demo room. Trade-show panels that read at four metres. Manual covers that match the boxes. And an owners app that uses the same green LED to mean the same thing.
The Recording Club
This brand book, the site it sits inside and the app vision next door were built by the club's own design and engineering team, as a Platinum membership build.