Opticos Design
Communications Tools and Templates
Opticos Design is an architecture and urban planning firm based in Berkeley, California. Over the firm’s 18-year history, numerous planning reports, client presentations, and marketing proposals had been developed with some continuity of design, but styles had become cumbersome and dated. Following a new website launch (by others), the firm seized the opportunity to update and streamline materials and set a new standard for communications tools. Covive designed of a suite of marketing materials and project templates, while reinforcing and reinvigorating the brand as a whole.
Marketing Materials and Project Templates — Before and After
Developed organically over the years, Opticos reports and branded materials had adopted an assortment of graphic elements that no longer served the organization as it moves into its next phase of maturity, growth and thought-leadership. Such elements — a graph paper pattern motif, arbitrarily rounded corners, a mixture of outdated fonts, and a palette of muted colors — overcomplicated designs and detracted from the images and ideas presented within.
In updating marketing materials and templates, Covive drew upon the simplified, modern design of the new company website, adopting Graphik as the singular font family for all materials, and reconnecting to yellow, black, white, and gray as the core brand palette. By eliminating extraneous design elements, reaffirming a yellow square as a supporting design element to complement the company logo, and increasing typographic hierarchy on a flexible grid, a cohesive, content-driven family of materials emerged.
Before design update
After design update
5x5 Brochure
Covive was tasked with designing a 9x12 presentation folder and a series of cut sheets that describe the company’s services and experience, particularly geared for the private real estate developer audience. Seeking to present a more cohesive story and position Opticos to stand out among competitors, Covive designed a 5x5 inch folded brochure, which opens to an impressive 25x10 inches. With an intriguing headline, concise narrative, showcase of graphic rendering styles, and a centerfold feature on the firm’s proprietary thought-leadership framework, Missing Middle Housing, the handout neatly achieves a wide range of marketing objectives across audience segments.
Templates for Project Reports, Display Boards, and Screen Presentations
In addition to branded marketing materials and proposals, the firm also wanted to update templates used for client deliverables including urban planning reports, display boards, and screen presentations for public meetings and workshops. Covive brought a wealth of experience and understanding of the purpose and common challenges of producing these documents, to deliver a cohesive family of templates that allow architects and planners to efficiently and effectively tell the persuasive stories of their projects through text and images.
Cover and slides (below) of staff training presentation
Brand Guidelines
Having completed a significant design update of all branded and project materials, Covive prepared a brand guidelines document detailing specifications for logo use, identification as a B Corporation, colors, fonts, grid layouts, and other unique graphic elements. Giving the document a final review, Opticos principal and owner, Karen Parolek, remarked "it feels like we are all grown up."