Traverse City, MI-based Corbin Design has devoted the majority of its 37 years of existence to EGD, with a primary focus on school-campus, healthcare-campus and civic-wayfinding systems. The company’s portfolio includes having developed wayfinding standards for such diverse clients as Indiana Univ. Health, Raleigh, NC and St. Louis.
Mark VanderKlipp, Corbin Design’s president, noted that, as clients are looking for more efficiencies, designer and fabricator relationships have become more nuanced.
“We’re proactive with our relationships, and we strive to involve them earlier in our projects to share expertise and father insights, such as fabrication techniques and pricing,” he said. “We’re not affiliated with any fabricators, but often develop preferred fabricator lists. We allow clients fair comparisons throughout the bid process.
“With respect to fabricators, we’ve struggled with a few shops that offer design/build services, and include design ‘for free’ and bundle it within fabrication and installation costs in order to offer a lower bid,” he said. “To me, this is a conflict of interest. We succeed when we help our clients say less with efficient signage that reduces clutter.”
As the scope of environmental-graphic design has broadened, Corbin’s work has extended beyond architects and also includes lighting designers, digital-sign purveyors and content providers, mobile-app developers and other consultants.
He praises SketchUp for its assistance with assessing a design’s scale, color, material use, landscape integration and other construction factors – without expensive prototypes. The firm designs its own Filemaker tools to create table-based applications that assist with site work and sign-message scheduling.
”There’s no substitute for experience, or for the curiosity about cognition and behavior within the built environment,” he said.
Corbin Design’s EGD program for the City of Calgary (Alberta) played a vital role in remaking the city’s image. Although the city shone brightly on the world stage when it hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics, it’s still saddled with the “Wild West” perceptions associated with its annual Calgary Stampede. In reality, cutting-edge architecture has redefined its downtown, and Calgary has developed into a major hub for information technology, oil and gas production and distribution, and financial services.
With this in mind, the city contracted Corbin to execute a civic-wayfinding system that reflects the city’s makeover – and celebrated its centennial in July 2012. AGI (Norfolk, VA) fabricated the pedestrian-signage program.
“We designed the system to serve as a utility to connect people to places while orienting and informing them,” VanderKlipp said. “Its form, location, typography and graphic approach reinforce the urban fabric of Calgary’s City Centre district.”
Corbin devised a multi-faceted, wayfinding-sign package for Utah Valley Univ. (UVU), which, with more than 30,000 students, is Utah’s largest public university. The new materials and color scheme now closely reflect the school’s cast-concrete architecture. To make the wayfinding system more accessible to students and visitors, Corbin created two campus districts (Mountainside and Lakeside) and reorganized the parking-lot system to integrate with existing, building-ID codes.
“Given this campus’ tremendous growth from a community college to a university, it was important to develop a wayfinding system in place to make it more accessible to students and visitors,” he said. “Because many college campuses have varied architectural themes, it’s rare that we’re able to create such a close relationship between signage and its surrounding structures. In this case, these carry not only the overall aesthetic theme, but also the look and feel of the new UVU brand as well.”