San Francisco Design Week identity uses huge monolithic letterforms

Designing for a design show requires an innovative solution – a standard identity that looks slick for an iPad and a compliment slip sometimes won’t cut it through numerous venues, on signage and outdoors. This identity for San Francisco Design Week manages to overcome all this using enormous 3D shapes, placed around the city and acting as a transparent window to the environment. Local agency Character created the 2015 campaign with the goal of “highlighting the uniquely diverse ecosystem that makes up this hub of creativity we call home,” it says.

The campaign is called Look Closer , and uses the huge sculptural letters to show that “design is all around us, shaping our world and all of its structures,” says Character. “Sometimes we just need a peek behind the scenes to really appreciate and understand it.” The campaign’s very physical bias reminds us of Kent Lyons’ identity for the Jarman Awards, which has no digital format and exists only as huge letterforms taken to different sites and photographed for each year’s awards identity.

The monolithic forms were placed around the city to frame noteworthy sites or natural beauty spots that inform and inspire the San Francisco design community. “The designs we make as designers reach far and wide as do their implications for the future,” says Character. “While small geographically, what San Francisco’s design community creates is massive in scale.”