When management of SRS Designs passed to the next generation, we created the new name and identity for the company that changed the way the world thinks about light.

Situation

Sy Shemitz was a lighting designer whose groundbreaking work warmed the facade of Grand Central Terminal and illuminated the Jefferson Memorial. Through the company he founded, SRS Designs, Shemitz was responsible for more than 30 mechanical and design patents for major innovations in asymmetric lighting.

Over 40 years, SRS worked on projects as diverse as the CN Tower in Toronto, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the reading rooms at the New York Public Library and the grand concourse of the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.

Mr. Shemitz’s daughter became Chairman and CEO in 2007. As she set to work she realized that her father’s reputation and the two product brands he had created — elliptipar and tambient — overshadowed the SRS brand. (Many people actually thought elliptipar was the company name.) She needed a stronger corporate brand name and identity to fulfill her vision for growing the business.

Solution

Before we could start exploring a name and logo, we needed to define a brand platform that respected the organization’s legacy but didn’t tie it to the past. Our brand promise focused on the collaboration between art and science that drives design and manufacturing excellence.

The name we developed — The Lighting Quotient — evokes precision engineering and alludes to the important role that lighting has in architectural solutions. The logo plays with a sense of scale and the there/not there quality of superior lighting design, balancing light and shadow to form the letter Q.

See the logo animation