Learn Your A B Sea!

The A B Sea Story

In July 2009 I worked as a graphic designer for a small brand strategy company in Dubai. It was a fun place to work for a while and we’d sometimes be set small internal briefs to keep our creative juices flowing. This time the brief was to design a desktop wallpaper on the theme of ocean awareness.

Most people in the studio took a very serious conservationist approach to the brief. At the time I had started taking my 18 month old daughter, Jasmine-Lily, to see the fish and sea animals at the local Dubai aquariums. One of the first words she ever spoke was ‘fish’ and later ‘shark’. As a result of these trips, and as a result of finding out that there was a fish beginning with every letter of the alphabet (I sort of cheated a bit on ‘x’!), my answer to the brief was to create a children’s alphabet-style chart based on the play on words ‘Learn Your A B Sea’.

The desktop wallpaper quickly became a large printed poster which is now hanging in my daughter’s bedroom.

In March 2010 I sent a tweet to the typography firm Hoefler & Frere Jones letting them know that I’d used on of their fonts, Gotham Rounded, on the poster. They re-tweeted my message to all of their followers (a lot of people!) and it was picked up by a designer called Jason Kottke. Jason included a post on his website and visitors to my site shot through the roof - over 2,500 in one day!

Some of those visitors left comments, mostly asking if the poster would ever be made available to buy. Almost exactly a year since the idea was born I had 200 of the posters printed, built this website and started selling them.

Since then the posters have shipped to all four corners of the world and been featured on loads of blogs and websites, including appearing in a number of interiors on the popular apartmenttherapy.com website!

In the spirit of the original brief I pledge a $5 donation to the charity Ocean Conservancy for every poster sold.

poster spec

• High-quality four colour litho printing
• Heavyweight 250gsm silk matt paper
• Width 841mm (33.1") x Height 594mm (23.4")
• The print comes unframed

shipping

• We ship to anywhere in the World!
• Prints are shipped rolled in a rigid cardboard tube with plastic end-caps
• Prints are shipped worldwide from the UAE by Express Mail Service (EMS) with global tracking
• Whilst we usually estimate deliveries taking 14 days, in extreme circumstances delivery can take up to 28 days

payment

• Payment are processed by PayPal
• You will be taken to the secure PayPal payments page where you can either pay using a credit card or enter your existing PayPal account details
• Once your payment has been processed by PayPal you will be returned to this site and a receipt will be sent to you by email

damage

• We have gone to great lengths to ensure that the posters are delivered in perfect condition, (and so far they always have). If you receive a damaged poster, please contact us immediately at info@jamesmattison.co.uk

contact

• PO Box 72931
• Dubai · United Arab Emirates
• info@jamesmattison.co.uk

copyright

All works displayed on this site are copyright of James Mattison. The material and content contained within or provided are for your personal use only and may not be used for commercial purposes or distributed commercially without permission. Your use of the site carries with it no rights in relation to copyright, trade marks or other intellectual property rights in the site. It is your responsibility to obtain permission from copyright holders or their agents before a reproduction of works or any other content is made, or this will constitute an infringement of copyright.