When South Puget Sound Community College decided to consolidate its student services into a newly remodeled building called 22 College Center, it wanted an interior environmental graphics program that would clearly identify departments, reflecting the school’s identity and the special qualities of its location.

SPSCC sits on 101 wooded acres in Olympia, Washington. The College Center is located at the heart of campus, and will house several departments, including student services, advising, and the library. We created a graphic program centered on an image of Evergreen trees, to reflect the college’s unique surroundings. This graphic appears throughout the building, calling out departments with a highly visible, tone-on-tone blue graphic band—a visually interesting way to integrate the school’s colors into the program.

One department that receives special graphic treatment is Student Services. The two-level building has an open central atrium, so the Student Services department on the second floor is visible from the lower level. The large-scale, eye-catching panel identifies the department and includes a typographic treatment listing the services offered.

By reinforcing the school’s identity through a clear department identification system, this program will help enhance the new building, creating a graphically interesting space that inspires school spirit.

Renovations will begin in December and the building, which is being designed by SRG Partnership, is slated for completion by July 2013.

If you’ve been in downtown Seattle over the past few days, you’ve probably noticed some large, colorful pylons around town. These 25 markers—a trail from Pioneer Square to the Seattle Center—are part of the Seattle Design Festival’s Design Marks event.

The event’s goal is to tell the stories of the city’s landmarks. Studio SC’s marker, located on Jackson Street and 3^rd Avenue South, celebrates the King Street Station and its influence on Seattle’s culture and history.  

Historically, King Street served as Seattle’s social hub, playing a role in the life stories of thousands of people—each of whom left their mark on the train station. We wanted our marker to be a physical manifestation of that idea, a place where people could share the basic details of their life journeys. Inspired by the design of classic baggage tags, we created a mosaic of blank tags for passers-by to leave behind a piece of their story—from their destination to the reason they travel to the items they can’t live without. 

To complement the marker we created a short video about traveling and the many reasons people do it. Baggage tags appear throughout the video, creating a narrative connection among the participants, and also referencing the design of the physical marker.

The markers will be on display until September 25, so you only have a few more days to come down to King Street Station and share your story.  We can’t wait to hear about your journey!

You can find more information about Design Marks here, and be sure to check out the markers and the videos made by other participating firms.

The inaugural Seattle Design Festival starts this week! As part of the festival, AIGA Seattle is sponsoring Design Marks—a trail of location markers at important Seattle landmarks—and we’re one of 25 local design firms involved in the event. 

Each firm selected a landmark in downtown Seattle that has influenced the city’s culture—SC chose the historic King Street Station, which is right outside our office. Participants then designed 8-foot-tall markers exploring the impact their landmark has had on design. Each firm also created a short video to further highlight the connection between the landmark and the design culture of Seattle. 

The markers go up this week, and ours is interactive, so we need your help! Swing by King Street Station (you’ll see the marker on the corner of Jackson and 3^rd Avenue South) to check it out between September 15 and 25. And don’t forget to tour the rest of the markers, too!

You can find more on the festival here.

The University of Washington’s new Alumni Commons building will be dedicated on Friday, as the UW celebrates its 150^th year.

The environmental graphics program we designed for the building showcases “Husky Pride,” tracing the university’s legacy with an eye on its future. The Commons celebrates everyone and everything that makes the University great—students, professors, alumni, parents, and fans, as well as inventions, discoveries, milestones, and the Seattle community.

Check back soon for more photos and details about this exciting new environmental graphics program!

The land around the Hanford Reach has been through a lot. From the Ice Age to the Manhattan Project to today, this section of the Columbia River Plateau in Richland, Washington, has seen an immense amount of change. Yet, the rocks beneath the surface and the Columbia River have remained constant.

The Hanford Reach Interpretive Center details this history. The building, designed by Jones & Jones Architects, features a Studio SC-designed site and interior wayfinding graphics program that speaks to the strength and power of the land and the water. The area, once home to the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor and a site of the Manhattan Project, sits on the last non-tidal, free-flowing section of the Columbia River. President Clinton declared it a National Monument in 2000.

The environmental graphics concept for The Reach has a modern feel that highlights the effect of water on the land by using materials that can be treated in a variety of ways. Signs feature both textured and smooth surfaces to mimic the impact of water on the surrounding area, particularly the basalt rock that abounds.

The Interpretive Center will be a destination for visitors interested in the rich history of Eastern Washington. The new building—with its exhibition galleries, classrooms, and activity centers—will tell the story of this community’s impact, both locally and far beyond The Reach.

Image: Studio SC rendering of the Hanford Reach vehicular and pedestrian directionals and the monument sign.

When The Museum of Flight’s new Space Gallery opens at the end of the month, it will house a retired space shuttle trainer—the only one of its kind in the world.

Studio SC created an environmental graphics program for this new building, a 15,500-square-foot-building, located across the road from the Museum’s main building. SRG Partnership designed the gallery, which was built by Sellen Construction.

One thing the Museum wanted was a bracketing system on the building’s exterior identity wall so they could hang vertical banners promoting the gallery and the Museum. Expanding on this idea, we worked with Creo Industrial Arts to design and fabricate a system of movable brackets, which allows for flexible configurations, and gives the Museum increased ability to create displays that fit its changing needs. 

To embrace the “outer space” feel, the building’s exterior wall is painted black and the identity is halo-lit from behind the letters. The stainless steel bracket system is composed of a series of round discs placed in a grid pattern on the wall. Against the black background, the discs create the effect of stars in space.

The building will be completed in mid-August, and the Full Fuselage Trainer will be installed and open to the public early next year.

Image: Rendering of the exterior identity wall at The Museum of Flight’s Space Gallery

We’re currently delving into the complex world of nanoscience as we work to create an identity and wayfinding signage program for the University of Washington’s Molecular Engineering Building. Our graphics will help tell the story of the work that’s done at the MEB, which includes research into areas of nanotechnology such as solar energy, clean fuel production, and more. Don’t know much about nanoscience? Don’t worry, neither did we. But we’ve got you covered with this primer of nano-facts.

Now just how small are we talking about here?

A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. So for a visual, the comparative size of a nanometer to a meter is the same as a marble compared to the Earth. Yeah, that’s pretty tiny.

We’ve been literally ‘playing’ with science.

A helpful (and fun) tool we’ve discovered: magnetic buckyballs. These super strong magnets mimic the bonds of fullerenes, hollow carbon-based molecules with impressively strong bonds. They’re named after designer/architect/engineer Buckminster Fuller, who’s known for creating geodesic domes, like Epcot’s Spaceship Earth. (Soccer balls are also shaped like buckyballs, which is may be why we like them so much.) Working with them helps us visualize different molecular shapes, which we can translate into our graphics. Plus, they’re endlessly entertaining.

Maybe architecture and nanotechnology aren’t that different.

We’re learning to visualize molecules in the same way we visualize buildings. Think back to high school chemistry class:  remember drawing out the chemical formulas of molecules? Those drawings, which tell you the composition of a molecule, help you visualize what it looks like in reality. That correlation reminds us of the way we can figure out what a building will look like based on the technical drawings architects provide us. Much as architectural drawings provide the data to determine the shape, size, and composition of buildings, chemical notation offers the same specs about the components of a molecule.

Do you think these scientists get a lot of requests for “Freebird”?

Researchers at Cornell created a nanoguitar in 1997: it was about the size of a red blood cell and shaped like a Fender Stratcaster. In 2003, they created a “playable” version (in the likeness of a Gibson Flying V). Light from a laser causes the silicon strings to vibrate at frequencies 17 octaves—or, 13,000 times—higher than a regular guitar. Rock on!

The science of art…or is it the art of science?

We’re working with two ideas for the environmental graphics at the MEB. One embraces the technical aspects, using chemical notation and shapes of actual molecules. The other is more abstract, using a pattern derived from nanophotonic images to create visual rhythm and imply molecular structures. We’re trying to find the right balance of literal and abstract to create visual connections that relate to the entire field of molecular engineering. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some Buckyballs to play with…