United Way of Greater Cincinnati has just opened a brand new Convening Center designed by Cincinnati architects, GBBN. White Design Studio worked with the center’s designers and with Murphy Catton to tell UWGC’s compelling story through its new center and throughout the building.

We urged the client to let us think of Signage, Wayfinding, Environmental Branding, and Donor Recognition as one system. What we achieved is a careful arrangement of emotional and verbal statements that guide users through the building, and through United Way’s local history, its aims and achievements, its donors and its impact on the community.

We worked very hard to integrate these statements into the architecture, and let the user’s natural approach to and through the building guide them through the story. Moments of pause offer more story to digest. Transient spaces offer more singularly emotional graphics. Large images terminate pathways and pull you through halls, and bright colors cue you to the most important wayfinding directories and destinations.

A Source of Inspiration

When White Design Studio set out to design 9 floors of environmental branding for the new CareSource facility in Dayton, Ohio, we had two parallel goals. We wanted to make a series of statements that illustrate to the company’s broad audience, its specific value. We also wanted the branding to embody the company’s core values and remind the staff of the importance of their impact on the lives of others. We did this by crafting a system of statements that met both of these goals, and tying those statements to photographic examples of the people they impact. We strengthened some of the company’s equity graphics and used those pieces as a three-dimensional quilt to tie our elements together. We worked closely with BHDP and designed our solutions to strengthen their architectural goals. Geograph manufactured the finished product.

RELATED LINKS | DETAILS | PRINT | INTERACTIVE | IDENTITY