http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/salespower/ (monthly column - link may expire after May)

San Francisco Business Times
Debra Nichols Design: Putting her best (type)face forward
by Sarah Duxbury

Debra Nichols' designs are everywhere you turn in new-millennium San Francisco.

Her firm has created the graphics at some of the highest-profile developments in the city -- from heady dot-com highs at SBC (née PacBell) Park, and encompassing the Ferry Building and port, Foundry Square and Mission Bay, the Asian Art Museum and the new de Young Museum slated to open in 2005.

The primary function of Nichols' work is to convey information, be it major donors to a museum, where to claim baggage at an airport, or even the identity of a building itself, as at One Market St.

But design expresses more than just the facts. It can create identity.

"You can extend the spirit of a building through typeface, colors, icons, the placement of elements," Nichols said.

That's what she did at SBC Park. A history buff, Nichols made China Basin's aging industrial aesthetic the ballpark's predominant motif. The Giants management was so taken with her vision that they incorporated it into the advertising guidelines for sponsors.

"Fans love our ballpark -- everyone describes it as beautiful," said Peter Magowan, the San Francisco Giants managing general partner. "We think that what makes it work is the detail, right down to what is the bathroom sign. How important is that? We think it's important to have signage done in an attractive and unified way. You usually just get a hodgepodge."

Four years later, the Giants and SBC brought Nichols back to help solidify the park's new corporate identity. The result is an animated neon "splashball" sign at the hitherto bare O'Doul gate on Third Street, the second busiest entry.

Nichols believes the computer age is making people more visually savvy, giving her signs greater import. Twenty years ago graphic designers created bank logos and corporate identities, Nichols said. Ten years ago most of her work was in office buildings being seismically retrofitted. Today, Nichols' clients have a greater sense of design, placing it squarely at the crossroads of communication, commerce and art.

As with SBC Park, Nichols' ideal projects are ones in which she is brought in with the architect, and the two work together to make signage a seamless part of the building. That ideal will be most vividly apparent at the new de Young Museum, where its name will be worked into the faceted copper plates of the façade.

Finding success is not easy when development is sluggish and in a field with no barriers to entry. Her best advertisement is her last project, Nichols said. With so many high-profile projects, hers is the shop to beat.