Grey matters

December 21, 2009 at 11:48 am
Filed under Branding, Typography

When your client is a creative services company, the design bar gets raised a bit. And when they move into a new headquarters space in a landmark building formerly occupied by toy companies, the fun factor really kicks in.

No problem for Pentagram partner Paula Scher, who conceived a “house of visual games” when she designed environmental graphics and branding elements for the Grey Group, one of the world’s largest marketing communications firms.

Collaborating with Studios Architecture, Scher and Pentagram designer Drew Freeman worked with the materials already being used in the project, celebrating the personalities of different divisions housed on various floors of the building.  The first-floor lobby features a dramatic logo wall of backlit metal mesh, incorporating logos for the Grey Group and its division G2.

The open, gallery-like spaces of the second floor inspired Scher to create a large-scale installation that is part art, part branding statement: a typographic neon sculpture featuring the Grey Group logo encased in a 35-in. acrylic cube. Surrounded by mirrored walls, the sculpture and its infinite reflections activate the space.

(Photos: Peter Mauss/Esto)

The fun and games even extend to restroom signs. Superscaled male and female icons read as “correct” at the entrance, but then optically “stretch” around the corner and down the hall. — P.M.K.