Plus everything: Crafting a future-focused identity that reflects this firm's focus on impact over architecture.

Client
2+ Architects
Industry
Architecture
Duration
6 months
Year
2022
Scope of Work
Brand Identity
Digital Design

A new name and design to elevate the brand’s identity so it reflects its true ambitions and ethos.

2PKM was named after the founding partners, and their vision was always to collaborate beyond specialties and borders. The change in name and design showcased this core way of working, and 2PKM became 2+. A simple and direct way of saying “we’re looking further than ourselves".

Making a big, bold mark

The brand's aspirations for its future were big — from wanting to design better spaces, to making an impact on the environment, to changing the course of public policy. So it followed that its identity needed to be bold and unmissable to align with its goals. The logo we arrived at was constructed out of square building blocks that are connected to make it sharp, angular and futuristic.

See,
touch,
feel.

We wanted to bring the materiality of architecture into the brand language. We borrowed liberally from the many materials used throughout the architecture process and incorporated it in the identity, playing with light, shadows and movement along the way.

We wanted to see how our logo interacted with light and shadow, and how it performed in the real world.

During the logo exploration, we conducted a materials workshop to see how we could create a logo with varied materials like clay, wire, paper and more.

The modular nature of the logo really shone in these forms, and it highlighted the plus as a device that could be taken much further.

Building blocks of the visual identity.

A strong angular logomark
A wide sans-serif font — AT Surt Extended
A grid motif made of plus marks.

A world of textures

Architecture is tactile, visual, sensory. We took the look and feel of metal, concrete, glass, steel and more and brought all those aspects into the brand identity.

A signal of growth that springs from a simple yet versatile design element.

Used in different sizes and densities, the plus served many purposes. A large plus was a statement. Sparser grids were patterns.  Denser grids were a replacement for dot matrices in print, and used to detail the terrains on floor plans.

For the website,  the secondary font became the primary one. Neue Haas Unica worked better for web since it was more digital friendly than AT Surt Extended so the two swapped positions in our type hierarchy for web communication.

For more details about the 2+ website, you can read our dedicated case study about it.

Much like the thought process 2+ has towards every project, we kept it simple yet impactful. We used a medley of textures without an overwhelming amount of detail.