Smart business owners know the value of well-designed signs. They capture the customer's attention, provide the first impression and communicate the type of business. Sign Gallery 7 offers a wide ...
A gallery of select SEGD Design Award winners
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By Steve Aust
The Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD), a 35-year-old organization that advocates for, and provides educational opportunities to, EGD professionals worldwide, has conducted its Design Awards competition for nearly two decades. The competition celebrates stately, bold or creative programs that reinforce a destination’s image, vitality or message. This sample of winners emphasizes the width and breadth of signage possibilities.
This year’s competition jurists included chairman David Vanden-Eynden, co-principal of Calori & Vanden-Eynden (NYC); Sandro Franchini, graphic-design director for Crate & Barrel (Chicago); Kelly Kolar, principal of Kolar Design (Cincinnati); Tali Krakowsky, director of experience design for Imaginary Forces (Hollywood, CA), a commercial-art firm; Merritt Price, exhibition-design manager for Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Museum; Ronald Shakespear, founding principal of Diseno Shakespear (Buenos Aires, Argentina); and Robert C. Whitlock, an architect for Kohn Pedersen Fox (NYC).
Maximum Sports
The Wilson Sporting Goods Co. enjoys an exalted place in the sports world – its gear and apparel see action on professional, collegiate and youth athletic fields worldwide. When the company relocated its Chicago headquarters, the firm enlisted Gensler’s Chicago office to develop the environmental design.
According to Gensler’s Alfred Fiesel and Tony LaPorte, respectively the firm’s project manager and senior brand designer, their EGD followed the mission of Chris Considine, Wilson’s president, to create a brand showcase.
After reviewing the facility’s unique, equilateral-triangle shape, the team created a comprehensive program that integrated environmental branding with the architecture. Centerpoint (Woodbury, MN), which has served Wilson’s exhibit-fabrication needs for more than a decade, built a 60-ft.-long graphic wall that featured folded-aluminum with direct-printed, digital graphics. These feature 1,200, 6 x 6-in., black-and-white images of such celebrated, Wilson-clad athletes as Tom Brady and Roger Federer, as well as equipment and historic people and moments in the company’s history. Centerpoint printed these graphics directly on the substrate using a Durst Rho 600 flatbed, UV-ink printer.
The eye-catching product sculptures – a pyramid of sports balls that reference the group effort required to build team success, a golf-ball “quilt” that’s linked together into a gently rolling surface, and a tennis-ball chandelier that references the game’s elegance – comprise actual equipment, which Centerpoint engineered and built through proprietary techniques. LaPorte said, “This project allowed close collaboration between our graphic-design and architectural staffs. This approach helped us to create a holistic, branded environment.”
The Birth of Faith
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