All Hands Publishing | Elliot Gale

Image of the sky at night, by Angel Cristi on Pexels

BRANDING • LOGO DESIGN

The Publishing Trade Winds Are Changing

I was first approached by V.R. La Bianca, a publishing expert whom I met through LinkedIn, in April of 2025. He explained to me how he was exhausted by the direction traditional publishing is going. Words such as "soulless", "assembly-line", "siloed", and "century-old" were used to describe the traditional publishing industry's book creation process.

He pitched me the idea of signing on to build a human-focused, collaborative, ethical version of what publishing should be. I've always dreamed of designing for a publisher, and thus All Hands Publishing was born.

But first, it needed an identity...

All Hands Publishing sticker circle ship

Goals

To provide aspiring authors with weekly project support from a team of dedicated experts (all hands on deck!)
To build a reader base while the book is being written, giving the author an eager audience
To ensure fair and equal say and pay by adopting a co-operative business model
To bring the humanity back to the publishing industry

I started how I always start projects: by brain-vomiting doodles and notes into my sketchbook. The pirate theme was clear from the get-go, and it was fun to lean into.

Then I moved into digital iterations. These were presented to V and the rest of the team and I received some helpful feedback.

The team was leaning toward options 3 and 4, so I took their feedback and built out a few more directions, all incorporating the star element. I also softened the red color and presented the logo options in each color.

The team pushed me to expand on the star and orbit theme. I built an icon and vertical and horizontal versions of the logo, as well as landed on a primary font.

Finally, the brand sheet was built. This was distributed to the team members as well as the lovely folks over at Evergreen Web Designs, who used it to build the All Hands website.

I now serve as a founding member and design expert on a team of five, building a reader base for our authors and working on other projects like our literary journal, FROGSKIN, podcasts & videos, and more.

Sticker designs by Elliot Gale for All Hands Publishing

FROGSKIN mascot illustration for All Hands Publishing

I designed an AHP sticker sheet to be sent to new authors as part of an onboarding package.

This is the mascot for FROGSKIN, our in-house literary journal, also illustrated by me.