Pi Supply sold Raspberry Pi hardware and made their own: HATs and add-on boards that extended what a £30 computer could do. They held Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller status, which is a useful constraint to design against — your packaging sits on the same shelf as Raspberry Pi's, and at their events in Cambridge it sits on the same table.
I was lead media designer for four years, and freelanced for them before that.
Product launches
The core of it. A HAT arrives as a bare board and a datasheet, and has to become something a person can understand, evaluate and buy: identity, packaging, photography, the product page, and the launch that carries it.
JustBoom was the audio range — DACs and amps for people building hi-fi around a Pi, an audience with strong opinions about sound and no patience for marketing. Flick did three-dimensional gesture sensing, which is difficult to photograph because the product is the empty space above the board. IoT Bit and the connectivity boards put cellular and long-range radio onto the platform.
Several others launched on Kickstarter — PiJuice, PaPiRus, Pi PoE and the IoT LoRa Gateway between them raised over £220,000. Those are a separate story.
The audience is the constraint
Raspberry Pi customers are technical, sceptical and vocal. They will read the schematic. They will notice if a photograph is a render pretending not to be, and they will say so publicly.
That shaped everything: photograph the actual board, show the ports at the angle that explains how it connects, and let the specification be the headline rather than an adjective. It is the closest brand work gets to engineering — accuracy is the whole aesthetic.
Everything else
I ran the e-commerce that sold all of it, produced maker-focused content teaching people to actually use the hardware, and covered international events with photography, video and comms from the floor.
The documentation habit started here. Explaining a HAT to someone who has just unboxed it is the same discipline as writing an application blueprint for a platform — work out what the reader already knows, then close the gap without condescending.