Birmingham AI | Origin

BHM, the Birmingham AI mark and AI in cream, spread across a soft band of blue light on navy

In less than three years, Birmingham AI has grown to more than 800 monthly attendees, with speakers from Anthropic, fifteen industry-specific breakout sessions, and multiple flagship events.

A Birmingham AI Event Volunteer badge on a white lanyard, the blue card with the wireframe mark worn against a dark knit sweater above a wooden table

To support the Birmingham AI team, we built custom tools into the web brand guidelines so they can create, animate and export breakout illustrations and social graphics on their own.

The Alabama Theatre stage on June 23, What's Next on the screen above the panel chairs, the crowd in the foreground

Birmingham AI's community had outgrown its website, and the new one needed to show the legitimacy of what was already happening as well as where the organization is going.

Brand Merch:Craft PencilBrown T-ShirtWhite T-ShirtNotebook

A brown Birmingham AI craft pencil, the mark and BIRMINGHAM printed in cream down the barrel

A brown Birmingham AI T-shirt with the BHM AI lockup across the chest in cream

A white Birmingham AI T-shirt with the BHM AI lockup on the chest in bright blue

Three Birmingham AI notebooks in blue, brown and grey, each with What's Next For You? and the wireframe mark

Photography:Selects

Two blue Birmingham AI business cards on brown paper: BIRMINGHAM AI across the front, and the mark, name, email, site and phone lines on the back

The Process

The Situation

The national AI conversation feels broken. On one side there is breathless hype, on the other there is existential dread, and in the middle real people in real jobs are trying to figure out what any of it means for their Monday morning.

In less than three years, with no marketing budget, Birmingham AI had grown to more than 800 people a month across fifteen industry breakouts. The community was exceptional, but the website and brand were lagging behind it. They didn't convey the legitimacy of the organization, and the messaging changed from one touchpoint to the next. Birmingham AI was operating like a movement and presenting like a meetup.

Strategic Position

Birmingham AI exists in that gap. It's an organic community where a banker, a nonprofit director, a software engineer and a marketing manager can sit in the same room and work through the same questions, over lunch, in Birmingham, Alabama.

There is no instruction pamphlet that comes with AI, so Birmingham AI has become the living instructional guide for adopting it in this city, with someone in your field showing a real workflow and getting a real win. We built the positioning around that, and around the belief underneath it, that if AI works for Birmingham, it can work anywhere. Accelerating AI Adoption, For All.

Compound Brand:: Brand strategy + positioning + messaging + visuals
Brand Executions:: Website, Events Page, Web Guidelines, Brand Tools, Motion, Event System, Activation, Merchandise

More Work Our best work comes from working closely with founders and the experts on their teams. Here's the work we're proudest of, made with clients we're lucky to have.

Cedar Creative business card on a wooden table

Cedar CreativeCedar Creative is a film production company in Birmingham whose work has always come first. We built a quiet, precise identity that lets the work speak, and a positioning that says what clients actually hire Cedar for.

AxiosAxios is a strength and conditioning club whose standard comes before the aesthetics. We built a hard, technical identity in red against dirty grey and black, a badge for a mark, and the website that carries it.

CaravanCaravan is an AI training company helping small and mid-sized teams put AI to work. We named it, built the brand system, and made a web tool that turns any photo into on-brand Caravan imagery.