ISAAC WOOTEN
The I.C.E. Society
A photography school on the web. Inspire, challenge, educate: a public home and a members’ hub, 2011.
A site that had to sell a photographer’s teaching without upstaging his photographs. The I.C.E. Society was Jerry Ghionis’s photography school: video chapters, monthly competitions, critiques and workshops for professionals and enthusiasts, built around inspire, challenge, educate. In 2011, at Levid Media, I designed the public home and the members’ hub. In 2026 I extracted that design’s DNA in Northlit and rendered the brand world it implied.
The brief
The product was the photographs. Everything else had to stay out of their way and still close the sale.
Ghionis shoots high-drama portraiture: backlit rain, smoke, red bamboo wallpaper, brides in chiaroscuro. The public home lets one of those images fill the screen and puts the pitch in a translucent panel over it, with the three words of the mission in a small-caps serif underneath and a carousel of the work below that. The members’ hub is the opposite problem, a dashboard of chapters, competitions and critiques that has to stay legible after a hundred logins, so it goes to paper and collapsible panels, with the drama kept to the thumbnails.
Blackletter, once
The gothic wordmark carries inspire, challenge and educate inside its S. It is the only blackletter on the site; everything else is a quiet serif and a sans.
Ink and teal
Near-black and a slate teal for the chrome, one ice-blue for links and buttons, and the warmth left to the photographs.
Two temperatures
The home is dark and cinematic; the hub is pale paper with dark bars. Same brand, two jobs.
Panels that collapse
What’s up, this month’s competition, critiques, favourite chapters: each a panel a member can close, so the hub is theirs to arrange.
The templates
Brand system
The 2011 templates set a mood more than a system. To see what the brand would have become, I pointed Northlit at them: the ink-and-teal palette with one ice-blue accent, the blackletter reserved for the wordmark, the serif small caps, the chiaroscuro imagery, extracted and locked as brand DNA. Then every surface was rendered from that source rather than designed again: identity, print, packaging, product UI, out of home, and the brand world itself. Tap any tile to open it.
Brand world · rendered in Northlit from the locked brand DNA
The 2011 templates are the design. The brand world is a 2026 study made with my own tool from those templates, not work delivered to the client. The photographs in the templates are Jerry Ghionis’s.
Inspire. Challenge. Educate.
The I.C.E. Society, the three words in the mark
Role
Levid Media in 2011 for the site. Northlit in 2026 for the brand world.
Creative direction
Founder and creative director at Levid Media, the agency that took the brief.
Home and hub
The public home and the members’ dashboard, two temperatures on one brand, designed end to end.
Brand DNA
Extracted from the templates in Northlit and locked: palette with roles, blackletter and serif type, imagery rules, anti-defaults.
Eleven surfaces
Logo system, stationery, packaging, merch, web, app, billboard and storefront, rendered from the locked DNA.
- Web design
- Editorial design
- Art direction
- Membership products
- Brand DNA extraction
- Northlit
Next
The templates live in the archive with forty-three other projects from the agency years.
Browse the archive →