Alevin Therapeutics. A brand that begins with alpha.

On a Tuesday in May 2022 Alice MacGowan, then Life Sciences Executive at Nottingham Technology Ventures, the University of Nottingham’s commercialisation company, emailed us about “a new company” that needed a website. They knew our work for other University of Nottingham companies, Neupulse among them.

Alevin had been incorporated in March, with pre-seed capital from o2h Ventures. Its founders, Professor Chris Moody, Tom McInally and Dr Alison John, had the science and the name. What they didn’t have yet was a look: no logo, no colours, and slides on the University’s template.

So we quoted for the brand and the website together, starting from the founders’ own ideas for fonts and colours, and from a principle we try to keep to:

We had a first call on the Thursday, sent the quote the next Monday, and were asked to go ahead a week later.

The name comes from the alevin, a newly hatched salmon. The science is about integrins, proteins with Greek names (one of them is αvβ6). Our first ideas in early June were molecules: an orange cluster, then blue hexagons. The one that stuck put the two halves of the story together: the first letter of Alevin, drawn as an alpha.

We tried it with red and green swooshes, white on black and in navy, and settled on a charcoal alpha with two blues. Then came the small adjustments that make a logo feel finished:

Two days later the answer came back:

The website had six pages at launch: Home, About us, Our Science, Pipeline, News and Contact. The founders wrote every word, refining their text over four drafts, and we laid it out with plenty of space around it, the molecular image behind the opening and a soft wave beneath it, the same curve as the swooshes in the logo.

When a colleague asked for the home page heading to sit on exactly two lines, we explained, with screenshots from a phone, that the site’s text and spacing grow and shrink with the screen, so fixed lines would make the words smaller on phones, and that the text size is chosen to stay easy to read. As our email put it, “If this was a print job (e.g. a brochure / poster etc.) then it would be a different story.” Chris’s reply: “The layout is fine.”

Team photos arrived from different places and cameras, so we set every portrait in black and white, to match Alison’s, and the team reads as one. The science is typed properly too: Greek letters as Greek letters, αvβ6 rather than “avb6”. The site went live on Tuesday 12 July 2022, ten weeks after Alice’s first email.

With investors to brief, Alevin needed its own slides, and Chris knew exactly what they had to do:

So the template keeps the colour to a blue band, the logo and the watermark alpha, and leaves the rest of each slide white. We sent 26 example layouts; Chris picked his favourites and asked for a smaller logo, an editable date and automatic slide numbers, and the revised file went back the next day with a short video walking through it. A year later:

In August 2023 Alevin asked for poster templates for scientific conferences, A0 in portrait and landscape. We suggested a design tool, and Chris put us right:

So both templates were built in PowerPoint, with the watermark alpha behind rounded panels and a QR code to the website in the corner. A month later Tom McInally presented Alevin’s poster, on the landscape template, at the 7th Annual IPF Summit in Boston.

Back home, Alevin wanted the poster on the website, but only for people who left their name, organisation and email first. That kind of download usually runs through a marketing system, and Alevin didn’t need one, so we used a form on the site: fill it in, and the download appears, the link arrives by email, and the details go to Alevin. Chris tried it out and reported that it worked perfectly.

Since the launch we’ve looked after the site and added Alevin’s news as it happened: the investment news in its first summer, its win at the OBN Awards that November, with a banner on every page, and a place on the Start-up of the Year shortlist at the Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Awards in 2023. Business cards for Tom, Chris and Sunil Shah, Alevin’s Executive Chair, went to print the same day they were asked for, and in 2024 the team moved to a page of its own, with Alevin’s advisors.

In February 2026 Chris wrote again:

The founders sent printouts of every page marked with ticks and crosses, and new words for each one. We made the changes on a private copy of the site, set up Pastel so they could leave comments on the pages themselves, and the refreshed site went live in April: a new opening, a rewritten Our Science page with a new diagram, the Pipeline as a page of cards, and new team biographies, in the 2022 design.