Designer: Mandy Barret

Pate Engineers, Inc., has a lot on its plate. Offering a full range of civil engineering services from planning and studies to survey to design to construction management, Pate’s promotional materials need to explain plenty.

This is just one of the reasons marketing coordinator Danika LaBrant wants a redesign of Pate’s main promotion. “The inside leaves little or no space to describe technical expertise,” she says. “The whole thing screams in-house production. The color doesn’t bleed to the edge, and the front graphic blends into the background.” She’d like something simple, with dramatic graphic elements to draw readers’ eyes to various areas of expertise.

Enter designer Mandy Barrett to give this promo the makeover it deserves. “I immediately noticed how busy the logo was, and I couldn’t understand the diamond pattern,” she notes. “It looked like a mistake to me.” She straightened up the diamond and shrunk it down, dumping the excess cover graphics. “Now they have a nice, clean logo, which will generate better name recognition,” she explains. “It’s not necessary to use it all over the piece—if it’s functional, it will be remembered.”

Barrett maintained the logo font Pate uses, Arial Black, because it goes well with her other choices of Eurostile and Gill Sans, which she chose for simplicity. “I wanted clean, thin lines,” she says. “Pate currently uses a condensed font for the copy, which can be difficult to read when copy is heavy.”

The piece had to stick with Pate’s colors, PMS 540 and 1245, and Barrett had no problem with that. “Pate creates name recognition through its colors,” she says. “I used them differently—instead of mostly blue, I wanted to draw attention with mostly yellow.” She suggests that Pate make use of screens, rather than using colors always at 100 percent.

Lastly, Barrett added interest to the copy-heavy piece by turning it on its side. The inside—basically a list of projects—doubles as a poster that can be posted in the office or at trade shows.