Brand identity + product

Picket: a brand for an AI security agent that shows the one alert that matters

Picket is an AI agent that works a security team's alert queue all night and hands the on-call analyst the one real incident, with the evidence attached. We built it from scratch: the name, a clay world that tells the story without a caption, a hand-drawn wordmark, the product screens and the brand out in the world.

Project: An Alterra Studio project: we built the company's brand, product and launch from scratch
Stage: AI security, Series A stage
Services: Naming, world and key art, wordmark and mark, product UI, applications, animated board
Tools: Imagine (our in-house design app), Nano Banana Pro, Kling, HyperFrames

Brief

The problem and the brief

AI security startups sell to teams drowning in alerts, then open their homepage on the word "agentic" and an abstract picture.

Picket is an AI agent that works a security team's alert queue all night, closes the false alarms with a note on each, and hands the on-call analyst the one real incident, with the evidence attached and a containment step ready to approve. Its buyer runs security at a Series A or B company: two to six analysts, thousands of alerts a week, nobody on nights.

The brief, in a founder's words: "Our homepage talks about AI when buyers want to see the one alert that mattered, with its evidence, and we lose them before they book a call." So the product itself had to be the proof.

What the buyer is up against

The research

4,484

alerts a security team receives on an average day.

Source: Vectra AI, 2023

67%

of those daily alerts are ones analysts can't get to.

Source: Vectra AI, 2023

241 days

on average to identify and contain a breach.

Source: IBM, 2025

Three doubts a security team brings to the first call

SOC leadAnother tool that adds alerts instead of closing them.
CISOAn AI that touches production without my sign-off.
On-call analystIt pages me at 3 a.m. for nothing.

Logic

The strategy: show the one alert, not the AI

Each screen answers one doubt with the product working. The clay world tells the same story without words: the herd is the queue, the pickets are the agent, the red one is the threat.

Doubt 1 · More noise?Another tool that adds alerts instead of closing them.
The queue counts down, not up
The first screen is the night shift at 03:16: 128 alerts tonight, 127 closed by Picket with a one-line note on each, one flagged. Tomato marks that one row and nothing else, so the colour itself means "this needs you".
Analysts can't get to 67% of the 4,484 alerts a day they receive.
Doubt 2 · Without me?An AI that touches production without my sign-off.
Containment waits for a person
Picket investigates and drafts the fix, but "Contain host" sits under "Awaiting your approval" until someone taps it. The phone card and the desktop panel show the same incident and the same button.
The CISO's doubt is about control, so the screen answers it with a button rather than a policy page.
Doubt 3 · For nothing?It pages me at 3 a.m. for nothing.
The page arrives with its evidence
The incident panel shows what's off against the company's own baseline (a keychain read never seen in 90 days, a domain no other device has reached), the timeline from the unsigned package to the upload, and what the machine can reach.
A breach takes 241 days on average to identify and contain. The panel starts the analyst at the answer, not at a blank search.

System

The design system

Sage, putty and moss for everything calm. Tomato only for the one threat, so on any screen or poster the red means "this needs you".

Sage #BFD0BCGrounds and product surfaces
Putty #ECE9E1Cards and the herd
Moss #2F3D35Type, the pickets, the wordmark
Tomato #F0472CThe one flagged threat. Never a button, never the logo

The world. A clay plain where a herd of identical creatures keeps walking and a crew of one-eyed pickets stands watch. When one creature is wrong, the pickets close round it. It had to read with no caption, and it does.

Wordmark and mark. Hand-lettered: the P's bowl curls back into itself and ends in a ball. Traced as drawn into 116 anchors. The P alone is the app icon.

Type. Familjen Grotesk for everything a person reads, Sometype Mono only for machine data: hostnames, times, IPs.

What we left out. 8 of 10 competitors open on abstract art, 7 pair a geometric glyph with a plain sans, 5 use red-orange as the brand colour. Picket does none of them.

Picket key art: one-eyed moss pickets fence a red creature inside a white clay herd

The 10-second board, made for LinkedIn and X.

The action clip: the last picket closes the ring.

Poster: Picket works every alert in your queue and fences in the one that's real

Poster: Picket closes the false alarms with a note on each

A shift-handover card with one line flagged by a red sticker

A plush picket with the P mark on its woven label

A card tag printed with the P mark tied round a clay picket

Gouache: a broken ring of moss strokes holds one red dab as white dabs drift past

Picket's X header: your alert queue, worked all night

Method

The category audit

We scored 10 funded AI security startups on our startup homepage benchmark. Not one shows the product working on the first screen at both phone and desktop width.

Each homepage was scored on 12 criteria, 0 to 2 each, at 1440 and 390 pixels wide. The category is strong on customer proof: only 1 of 10 has none, against 53% of startups in our wider benchmark.

The gaps are on the first screen. 1 of 10 says what it does at both widths, 2 give one clear next step, and 9 lead with the same words: "agentic" or "AI SOC". Those are the gaps Picket's homepage is designed to close.

Homepage score out of 100 (12 criteria, 0 to 2 each): 10 funded AI security startups, October 2026

Company A83
Company B75
Company C71
Company D67
Company E67
Company F63
Company G63
Company H63
Company I58
Company J54
Benchmark average, 100 startups59

Alterra Studio startup website benchmark 2026. Companies are anonymised.

The offer

What we'd ship

For a real AI security company, this is a Brand + Website Build.

Brand: Name check, world and key art, wordmark and mark, palette and type, and the rules for the one accent colour
Homepage: A first screen that shows the product working at desktop and phone width, with one clear next step
Product: The core screens in the brand: the queue, the incident panel, the on-call card
Launch: The animated board, posters, merch and social for launch week

After this

What's next

Build the homepage with the queue as the first screen at 1440 and 390, and score it on the same benchmark.
Add out-of-home a billboard and a subway lightbox, the one place the brand hasn't been taken yet.