Identity, communication, and environmental design for education, entertainment, and enterprise.

Founded in 1988, Alexander Isley Inc. is a design consultancy focused on collaborating with educational, cultural, and cause-related organizations. We use the power of design to tell stories with honesty, intelligence, imagination, and wit. (Pretty much in that order.)

We are an optimized and efficient team of experts. We work smartly and efficiently. We focus our attention on only a few clients at a time. We offer an unusually wide range of capabilities for a studio of our size. We like people.

Our process:
Step 1: Figure out who we’re talking to.
Step 2: Figure out what they need to know.
Step 3: Figure out the best way to tell them.

(Translation: We decide what a design should look like only after we decide what it should do.)

And what else?
We’re known for innovative and effective work that captures people’s imaginations and inspires them to take action. Our work embraces the power of narrative, the inventive incorporation of physical structure, and a love of letters—and how they can all work together to put forth a compelling argument.

We work within all areas of design to ensure that a story is engaging and consistent:


About the company

Alexander Isley founded our firm in New York City, where we spent our first several years toiling away in a cast-iron building on lower Broadway. We love New York City, toiling away, and cast-iron buildings, but we’d always wanted to work in a barn.

So we did something about that: Our office is now a green barn in Connecticut, where we look forward to coming in every day to do work we enjoy alongside people we like.

We have been honored with the Federal Design Achievement Award, The Webby Award, the SEGD Global Design Award, the I.D. Gold Award, and Time magazine’s “Best of the Year” designation.

Our work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Institution, the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, the Poster House Museum, The Letterform Archive, the Herb Lubalin Study Center, and the Library of Congress.

Alex is a recipient of the AIGA Medal, awarded for distinguished achievement and contributions to the field.