Studio SC’s New Space

Welcome to our Studio! We’ve recently expanded and want to take you on a tour.

Our office is in the US Rubber Building in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square. Over the years, the building has retained its industrial nature and Pacific Northwest vintage character. A three-story spiral chute, a remnant of the rubber manufacturing process, still stands in our entrance hall. Inside our space, natural light floods through the oversized windows on to the original brick walls and enormous exposed wooden beams.

After spending years in tight quarters, we recently increased our floor plan by nearly one-third. We took out an adjoining wall, exposing the spine of the building and the amazing timber structure of the old factory. We also designed custom partitions to give everyone a bit of their own space. These updates give us room to grow and provide us more opportunities to infuse our design principles—and our personalities—into our own environment.

Happy New Year!

Last week, the entire Studio pitched in on a holiday art project: hand-painting our 2^nd floor office windows with a New Year’s message for our Pioneer Square neighbors.

We chose Bodoni Poster as the font, because it is stylish, simple, and readable. We printed each windowpane section to create transfers, outlined the letterforms with grease pens, and squeegeed the transfers onto the windows. Once the outline was applied, we used Tempera paint to fill in the letters.

It was a fun way to spend a day and gave us a chance to get away from our computers and recall the industry’s hand-crafted past while looking forward to the future.

Happy Holidays from Studio SC

We’ve recently had our own Santa’s workshop in our office building, where we’ve been creating a set of Studio SC Cornhole boards.

If you’re not from the Midwest, you may be wondering what in the world we’re talking about. Allow us to enlighten you:

Cornhole or Corn Toss is similar to horseshoes except you use wooden boxes called cornhole platforms and corn bags instead of horseshoes and metal stakes. Contestants take turns pitching their corn bags at the cornhole platform until a contestant reaches the score of 21 points. A corn bag in the hole scores 3 points, while one on the platform scores 1 point.

(via the American Cornhole Association, which counts our own Cory Binau as one of its 34,000 members.)

Cory and Faith, native Ohioans, introduced the rest of us to the game this summer, and we were hooked. We decided a set of homemade boards would be a fun addition to the office and a great Christmas present for Mark and Billy.

We wanted the design to be simple, highlight the natural wood of the boards, and jive with Studio SC’s brand colors of white, black, and grey. We decided to stain the boards to let the natural wood take center stage. To bring in the brand, we’d paint a white border around the edges and the hole, include Studio SC’s logo, and create a set of bags in both black and white.

Cory started building the boards in October and then brought them in to the office, where we set up a makeshift art studio in the basement. Armed with wood stain, white paint, painter’s tape, brushes, Exacto knives, and vinyl stencils, we logged several cold and clandestine hours, sharing stories and jamming to KEXP.

After a few months of work, we surprised Mark and Billy with the boards yesterday morning. So if you’re ever up for a game of Cornhole—whether to show off your skills or just learn the game—stop on by!

Happy Holidays from all of us at Studio SC, we hope you’re having a fun and festive season!

Sign Prototyping at Seattle Children’s

After working on the Seattle Children’s Hospital project for over a year, we’ve finally had a chance to see some of our signs in the environment.

We worked with Image Mill, a local fabricator, to produce temporary signs to test for legibility, color, consistency, size, cap height, and clarity. The signs were placed in a low-traffic area of the hospital for a single test day.  This allowed the design team to see how the signs looked at full size in the environment and provided doctors and patient-families an opportunity to experience the wayfinding paths and offer feedback.

This process of testing, feedback, and streamlining is part of Continuous Performance Improvement, an efficiency strategy that Children’s employs. CPI is a theory of customer-focused and efficiency-minded principals—inspired by the Toyota Way—geared toward eliminating waste and increasing value to customers through continuous small improvements.

“Children’s CPI culture means that the they are fully engaged in the design process,” says Mark Sanders, project director. “Hospital leaders see a strong wayfinding program as a significant benefit to families, hospital staff, and the bottom line.”

The overall response within the hospital was extremely positive, says Project Manager Cynthia Hall. “The signs were really well received,” she says. “We learned a lot about how the signs function in the environment and how the users interact with them, all of which will be helpful as we further develop designs and move into fabrication.”

As we work to refine the signage package for both the Building Hope expansion and the campus master plan, we’re also partnering with a team of illustrators, Oakland, CA-based Lab Partners, to create artwork that will help identify each zone of the hospital and reinforce the wayfinding program. The artwork they’ve created thus far is a wonderful combination of nature and nurturing elements that reflect Children’s Pacific Northwest identity.

Husky Pride at UW’s Alumni Commons

We’ve already introduced you to the graphics program in the UW’s new Alumni Commons building. Now that it has been open for a little more than a month, we want to give you a more in-depth tour of the new space.

The goal of the Commons is to celebrate “Husky Pride”—the pride felt by all those who have been involved with the University since it was founded in 1861. “Each aspect of the program speaks to something the University values, from the members of its community to the philosophies that drive its progress to the environment in which it exists,” says designer Faith Berry.

A backlit glowing gold wall in the common area features routed typographic statements of values and philosophies that the University has built upon.  A People Wall, filled with photographs and quotes of the UW community, is the focal point of the conference room. This wall highlights the personal connections people have with the University, and the impact the school has had on their lives.

To bring a piece of the surrounding environment inside, a large graphic of Mount Rainier fills a wall at the end of a long corridor, mimicking the iconic view of the mountain that’s visible from the UW quad. From afar, the graphic simply looks like a purple half-tone image of the iconic mountain. But up close, it’s clear that the image is actually composed of a series of textural W’s in UW’s brand mark.

The graphics program also includes a timeline wall, which is still in development. This wall serves as a record of specific successes in UW’s history. Its non-linear nature allows it to be easily updated to highlight future achievements.

As the University of Washington celebrates its sesquicentennial this year, the new Alumni Commons building serves as an elegant and energetic tribute to the accomplishments of the UW’s past 150 years and looks proudly toward its future.

Images taken by Ben Benschenider (click an image to view larger).