WORK / OKAFOR & REED
Okafor & Reed
A quietly bold identity and portfolio site for a 14-person architecture studio in Manchester.
BRAND IDENTITY · WEBSITE · PITCH DECK
OVERVIEW
Quietly bold, and built to win bids.
Okafor & Reed is a 14-person architecture and interiors studio in Manchester, founded in 2011. They design libraries, schools, community buildings and private homes across the north of England. With a founding partner retiring and three associates stepping into leadership, they wanted a brand that could help them win larger public projects.
CHALLENGE
Strong buildings, a forgettable brand.
Their grey wordmark and PDF portfolio didn’t match the quality of the work, and younger staff called the brand “a bit dull”. The studio was now bidding against bigger practices, judged by cautious panels who read a lot of dull proposals. The partners also wanted different things: “quietly bold”, “nothing that dates” and “less beige”.
APPROACH
A brand that reads like a drawing set.
I explored two directions, Drawing Set and Open Site, then combined them into one system called Set & Site. Drawing Set brings the calm structure of a good drawing set: grids, title blocks and labelled dimensions. Open Site adds the personality, with a large tonal ampersand behind each hero and tile green for buttons, tags and links.
The palette comes from the buildings they make: lime plaster, slate, brick, oak and tile green. Newsreader sets the headings, Instrument Sans the body copy and IBM Plex Mono the dimensions on drawings. The wordmark keeps the ampersand Helen asked for, avoids all caps and still works in one colour at 20mm for procurement documents.
On the website, every project shows a drawing beside a photograph, so phone shots from site visits sit comfortably next to professional photography, and every image is credited. Project pages open with the facts a bid panel looks for first: place, type, client, floor area and status. It’s built in Framer with a CMS, so the team can rename a project without calling a developer.
THE SET & SITE SYSTEM: PALETTE, TYPE AND THE WORDMARK
SELECTED PROJECTS: A DRAWING BESIDE EVERY PHOTOGRAPH
PROJECT PAGES: THE FACTS A BID PANEL LOOKS FOR FIRST
CAREERS: WRITTEN FOR THE GRADUATES THEY WANT TO HIRE
TOOLS USED
Figma
Identity, guidelines, pitch deck template and the website designed in Figma, with the full Set & Site palette and type set up as styles. The site is planned for Framer with a CMS, so the studio can edit project pages themselves.