Nicole Norgren on Brand, Team Identity, and the Character of Place
Nicole Norgren is a leader on Multistudio’s Brand Experience team. Her portfolio spans brand development and visual identity creation, as well as environmental graphics, signage, and integrated wayfinding.
Shaped by the belief that experiences and storytelling go hand in hand, Nicole creates immersive, high-touch environments that deepen human connection, strengthen placemaking, and bring stories to life. A BFA from the State University of New York at Fredonia and 18 years of experience across graphic design and creative direction have equipped Nicole with a rolodex of visual language tools, which she carefully customizes and refines with each project.
The BrandX team’s focus expands across market sectors, chameleonic by design and not limited to a single “Multistudio look.” Whether shaping a singular moment or an expansive experience, their work responds fluidly to the conditions of each project—its context, place, audience, and intended impact.
Integral to how teams at Multistudio approach projects, the BrandX team is constantly engaging with architects, city planners, and interior designers, which directly informs a unique understanding of three-dimensional space. The team understands the construction process, what considerations go into designing a space, how users engage with an environment, and where brand can fit into the entire scope of an experience.
We sat down with Nicole to learn how she helps her team adapt, innovate, and deliver on an extremely diverse range of project types.
Nicole Norgren: After getting a BFA in graphic design, my first job out of school was at Fisher-Price, the toy company, and I was on the package design team. I was working on packaging, point-of-purchase displays, in-aisle merchandising, and all of these new—to me—avenues of design. I really enjoyed it. The role required me to think about design as something that people look at, interact with, pick up, and ultimately play with.
How do you encourage someone to take a toy off the shelf? How do you encourage them to try things? These were design questions that I had never thought of before or learned about in school.
I was engaging with brand and design as an experiential practice — thinking about how 2D graphic design can be amplified and elevated when it’s strategically situated in a three-dimensional space.
NN: This new way of thinking naturally led me towards the architectural world by challenging me to approach design as something that can exist off the page. It was an interesting path — very weird, divergent, and wandering, but I found it.
After Fisher-Price, I spent time as a graphic designer and art director at a couple other companies, but when I found this role at Multistudio, it felt like all my interests clicked.
Now, I could not imagine going back to doing flat, 2D branding. The parts that I love about my role and the projects we get to do are the three-dimensional, experiential outcomes that strengthen placemaking and help define the use of a space.
NN: Brand Experience (BrandX) is a market sector, meaning we can win and lead our own project work. In addition, we can operate as a subset of our architectural projects across different sectors, like Higher Education, City Design, or Sports & Recreation, to name a few. This adaptability makes us unique among the sectors because we can scale up or down significantly to accommodate project goals.
When you consider the BrandX team against competing agencies, it quickly becomes clear that our team brings a different level of expertise and depth of knowledge to project work because we are embedded in an architecture studio. We have an inherent understanding of place, making us well-positioned to brand literal geographic destinations — like the Town of Gilbert — or create brands that are embedded in a navigation system.
There is a level of functionality to our work that is not always top of mind when people think “brand.” Good branding goes far beyond slapping a logo on a wall and calling it a day. It’s the thought process behind that logo; it’s the color and material palette, signage, and wayfinding motifs that combine with the existing contextual cues to evoke the inherent character of a place.
NN: I love digging into a good puzzle. No matter the sector or market, I am always energized by identifying a challenge and working as a team to determine the best solution. It’s crucial to dive into the context of a project to understand the "why," identify challenges, and ask a lot of questions — then ask more.
I love the interactive experience of engaging with my colleagues alongside a client and the community. Intentional and thoughtful collaboration develops a richness to project work that leads to better outcomes.
If I had to narrow it down to sectors, the two focus areas that energize me the most are high-touch visitor experiences and placemaking city design work.
The former includes the user experience environments that are often found around sports, entertainment, and hospitality spaces. These projects typically allow the team to partner with interior designers and architects more closely, creating opportunities like selecting the tile and the furniture, or having a say in the actual layout of a space, which is all a part of someone’s brand. These particular markets also tend to be more playful with brand, allowing it to come to life in a multitude of ways.
On the flipside of that, city design brand work poses an entirely different set of challenges. Often with this project work, there is not a single, physical building or room to brand — it’s an entire township, district, or overall vibe. That work tends to fall more in the traditional brand strategy realm, using logos, colors, signage, and wayfinding that all evoke the spirit of a location.
Both of these focus areas use the same core philosophy of identifying and enhancing the character of a place, but translated through two different approaches.
NN: Our projects are all so different and that’s completely intentional. We never want a project to have an obvious “Multistudio look,” because to us, a brand should be 100% evocative of who it’s representing. You could hold up any two of our completed projects side-by-side and you wouldn’t know the same firm designed them.
When you browse our portfolio, you’ll see everything from hand-drawn illustrations to clean-line graphic imagery and everything in between. Our work approach is focused on serving the client. And maybe the client is a restaurant group, or a township, or an elementary school — the application of brand in these three spaces can and should vary dramatically from one another.
We approach every project with fresh eyes and open ears. It’s our job to identify the existing characters, stories, and communities that make up the identity of a place and then communicate that through strategic branding choices.
