SPG Environmental Graphics
Role: Environmental graphic design · part of a company-wide team project · Signature Products Group
SPG had just rebranded with a new logo, but the building had no established visual language yet and the marketing team was tasked with filling more than a dozen walls with large-format graphics, some in SPG's own branding and others representing our brand partners. The challenge was making separate walls, across many different brands, feel like one connected environment.
Our identity is built on the idea of confluence, understanding our brands so deeply that we become them, which is why our logo uses smooth, curving forms that evoke a river confluence. I took that same shape and movement from the logo and used it to create the clipping masks for all the wall graphics, so every image was cut to the brand's signature curve. A product designer suggested we fill the space with big, aspirational brand photography. A junior designer complemented this by extending the logo into a "swoosh" overlay that runs across the images.
In select graphics, the subject breaks out of the photo by sitting on top of the swoosh: the Hurley surfer riding through the wave, the Browning hunting dog leaping over the band, the Fox rider flying past it. It turned a set of static brand photos into a dynamic environment that captured how alive our brands are. With that last piece, the team built a unifying visual system, tying the brands all together under SPG.
To keep the space current without reprinting the walls every year, our art director introduced mounted vignettes: smaller seasonal panels swapped more often than the graphics behind them. I planned each brand's story across two to eight panels, scaled to how much it had to say that season. I also developed the treatment for the product pedestals from our trade marketing team, wrapping each in a flood of its brand's color, with a vertical logo hit for Fox, so they read as an extension of the walls, not separate fixtures.
The entry brand hall, which I designed, leads with our two biggest brands, Carhartt and Browning, sharing the first panel by the entrance, then opens into lifestyle imagery for partners like Hooey, Huk, Fox, Hurley, Realtree, and Wolfgang, each with its own seasonal story.
Finally, I was trusted to design the building's flagship piece on my own: a single 61-foot showroom graphic, the largest installation in the space. It extended the visual language we'd built downstairs into one monumental piece. I arranged the brands by importance, our biggest partners anchored in the center around SPG, and, where possible, chose imagery composed to shift up and to the left, following the curve of the masks. I positioned subjects to face inward, those on the left looking right and vice versa, so the eye is continually drawn back to the center. For our brands without photography, I defaulted to vector patterns. The result was the largest single graphic in the building, one 61-foot piece pulling every brand we represent into a single, unified statement.
