Author: Jolene Rosa

Environmental graphic design (often shortened to EGD), inherently sits at the crossroads of architecture and human experience. Our goal as designers is to give buildings a voice, to make them speak to their inhabitants in a purposeful way using architectural elements, design and messaging. At 3d-identity (3DID), we call this work “visual storytelling”.

Beginning with a human-centered approach, we aim to understand the user and how they might interact with the space. We call this our “discovery phase.” For some clients, discovery might look like uncovering your brand’s ethos, and telling that story throughout the built environment. For others, discovery might be all about uncovering local culture and crafting a story that firmly grounds the space within its geographic context. Either way, our designs always come from a place of meaning. And meaningful designs are what create meaningful, purpose-driven spaces. When places have a purpose, people then have a purpose to go and occupy them.

As we return to the office, we return with new standards of what we want our spaces to do for us. We prefer multi-faceted spaces that can meet a variety of needs, which means spaces with multiple uses, as well as spaces of multiple sizes. Ultimately, a big part of what we crave is simply environmental enrichment.

During quarantine, monotony was the name of the game. Coming out of it, we desire a higher level of enrichment and seek more meaningful experiences wherever we go. We want different, new, variety, and meaning – the opposite of what a pandemic quarantine provided to us. Most importantly we seek purpose in our actions. We want to feel like we’re going to a place that was purposefully designed to fulfill our needs for the day. EGD is that layer of storytelling that creates enriched, destination-worthy spaces.

As many industry leaders have previously and correctly identified, people are spending less time in the office– but with more intentionality. Many seek office spaces as a place for collaboration and inspiration. They seek to get something out of their experience there. At 3DID, we like to imagine what a space could do for you by asking “what if” questions, followed by “how might we…?” For example: What if your space could inspire you every day? What might that look like? What if your space could be a hive of collaboration? How might we facilitate that? Or what if your space inspired you to engage with your local community? What stories might we tell to achieve that?
As we collectively embrace a shift towards hospitality in the workplace and look for ways to create purposeful spaces, environmental graphic design becomes more important than ever to the built environment.