Finding the Way to a Solution

Marriott is a highly-recognizable hotel brand with locations across the country. Their logo is easy to spot from the highway or along main street, but when they opened their downtown Manhattan location in the Financial District -- just steps away from One World Trade Center -- they found that the positioning of their new building left them with a bit of a problem.

If you've wandered the streets of the Financial District, you may have found yourself getting easily turned around. This historic part of Manhattan is off the grid, so to speak, leaving tourists and hotel-goers with more of a challenge to find their way around than the more cleanly laid-out parts of the city. Another issue with this location is signage: because of the density of businesses and offices, Marriott couldn't employ their usual vertical signage to call attention to their location.

At DBC, we were excited to take on this challenge. How best to guide hotel guests to their destination in the limited space available? Using the building's exterior as our artboard, we utilized the hotel itself as signage. We created a number of eye-catching options and rendered 3D mockups, like the one below, of what the design would look like once installed.

Being able to provide 3D renderings of large-scale environmental design and signage projects really allows clients to envision a major transformation. It also helps us as designers to find new ideas or other potential problem areas before installation takes place. It's a pleasure to be able to walk through this district now and see our work in action.