SOM City Design Practice Book

The Skidmore, Owings & Merrill City Design Practice is a collective of many design studios throughout the world that share a commitment to achieving a more urban and a more balanced relationship between our larger built world and our natural systems.

Thirst Worked with SOM to collect their portfolio in to a 192-page document of the firms impact on the world. The resulting 192-page book is a testament to SOM’s commitment to making the world a sustainable, balanced place for all living things.

During the process of curating the content for the book we helped SOM formulate a “template” for telling their stories. Which we then turned in to the SOM playbook offering a unified method of presenting their work across SOM’s multiple offices.

The book is organized into thematic groupings of project. With each section showing where the projects are in the world.

The book begins with an opening call to action, translated in Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic.

Before presenting the work of the firm, we highlight SOM’s 9 design principles that run through all of their work.

Sections open with challenge pages that outline the unique challenges of these types of projects.

Each page is illustrated with an abstract representation of the type of projects in the section.

Projects open with an overview statement and image.

Each page of the project highlights the specific challenges and principles.

At the end of the book we highlight some of SOM’s built successes.

After completing the book itself, we distilled the format into a simple set of guidelines for how to tell the SOM story.

Each page type is clearly articulated and simple to write within.

Each project includes a red page where the principles of the project are outlined in short bold statements.

We developed a color palette that can be used to unify the planning diagrams from the various offices.

We offered suggestions on various treatments to existing digital renderings.

Client: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Service: Print