PAE + Luma

PAE Engineers is a global leader in sustainable engineering design. A new brand look, feel, voice, and digital destination surfaces their Their driving mission: to create ideal solutions for their clients while preserving our ideal planet. Their portfolio shows the story through: a tour-de-force of work that solves complex mechanical, electrical, and lighting design challenges of award-winning LEED-certified buildings.

Their new digital brand home began the brand reinvention, with design as bold as the work it features, worthy of the company that engineered the world's largest living building: Seattle's Bullitt Center. The work surfaces in a museum catalogue feel across a signature grid system with a fresh structural edge. The portfolio is a centerpiece, relying upon navigable tiles, striking imagery, and tightly-worded case study pages to demonstrate the impact of their creations.

To create space for their work to truly shine, information architecture pared the sitemap and content, addressinged varied browsing paths and behaviors efficiently, and enabled a responsive design that renders seamlessly across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Content highlights bold statements and easily digestible stats to quantify their accomplishments on behalf of clients, and the world. It's augmented by an Impact section that re-imagines the typical blog into more sparing glimpses of thought leadership.

The site sets a standard for PAE’s brand and for their sector. It serves as their foundational brand expression, elevates and positions the company and its work for its industry-wide leadership and its worldwide, sustainable vision.

The digital look, feel, and content extends to all touchpoints in their sales cycle, conveying PAE’s mission in modular print collateral and business systems, all sustainably sourced and modular. Copy woven in as section breaks and asides delivers key messages about the brand and our world.

Luma is the lighting design practice of sustainable design leaders PAE. Their role: integrating light into spaces and materials to expand possibilities and shape human experiences. Design-driven, technically-minded, and people-powered, Luma’s approach is highly collaborative and inherently sustainable. Their humanistic ethos and innovative practice comes to light in a new digital destination and brand identity.

In digital, subtle yet striking behavioral physics are as much a part of Luma’s story as design. A home page brand intro elegantly fades to reveal navigation, User mouse movement within projects is tracked to react smoothly.. Filters and links animate on enter and exit, and pages both fade in and up. All the technical transition details create a feeling of the site revealing (or, illuminating) itself.

Within work pages, projects are immersive and interactive, using large type to make bold introductions before letting work imagery do the heavy lifting. Adopting a museum-like sensibility, each project uses a different, dynamically-controlled background color palette to mimic how light can affect color in live space. An image counter details page position, while wayfinding between projects echoes museum signage.

To visually convey Luma’s artistry, design boldly dramatizes the impact their work has on spaces. On the homepage, the brand is cinematic, free of navigational distractions, leveraging typography and arresting imagery to create the feeling of a film or exhibition. Minimized content elevates brand perception and visual expression of form. Design doesn’t just make room for Luma’s elemental creativity — it mirrors it.

Working in a field that’s primarily about attention to detail, “industry caliber” is the driving lever behind the site’s strategy. From the design language to functional behavior, it scales responsively to myriad devices.. All told, it conveys the brand’s innovative edge, where forward-thinking and talented humans harness the power of light to brighten the planet in inspiring ways.

If the digital foundation establishes the core look and feel, a new logo extends from it to round out an emerging visual identity. The mark’s variations take their inspiration from the same ideas of light and form, using modulating lightwaves to suggest the mysteries and potential they reveal with light.