City Tower
City Tower (OBI)
City Tower, a 1960s modernist office building overlooking Piccadilly Gardens, had lost much of the bold character that defined its original vision. Despite its prime location, vacant floors and low tenant engagement meant it was no longer attracting the ambitious businesses it was built for.
Working with OBI, we repositioned City Tower as a destination for innovative, fast-growing organisations by reconnecting the brand with its pioneering heritage. Research into the building uncovered original woodblock-style lettering hidden within the service staircases, inspiring a bespoke typeface that became the foundation of a new identity system.
Designed to work across wayfinding, marketing, digital platforms, and printed communications, the typeface balanced the building's history with a confident, contemporary character. The wider identity extended across signage, publications, events, and internal touchpoints, creating a consistent experience for tenants and visitors alike.
Within a year of launch, most vacant floors had been leased, tenant engagement had increased, and City Tower had established a stronger reputation as one of Manchester's most creative commercial destinations. The identity continues to support the building's evolution while celebrating the ambition that shaped it more than sixty years ago.
We had an amazing cooperation with Applied Systems Design Studio. They're very professional and flexible. From experience with other graphic designers, we had found it quite difficult to enter a conversation and a process where the content and the form would go hand in hand. In moments of decision, if it was for the font, layout, colour palette or the print technique, they always had prepared mood boards with different choices and information for each for us to be able to choose from. In this regard, I feel we have also learnt something about graphic design. The choices didn't seem to be empirical, but they explained why they propose to use X instead of Y, it was specific to the content. The process was enjoyable, they have been flexible and not afraid of making some changes along the process to facilitate the success of the project. We used risograph printing which is probably not the easiest one, but they were brave and curious enough to try it out and we really enjoyed the result! We have worked on a magazine design together and now we hope that we will work on an entire art & architecture festival in the future
