Beacon

A unified design system that scales with its audience

After working with Beacon Capital Partners to create a return-to-office app, we teamed up again to create a digital strategy and presence that laddered up to Beacon as it is today—the country’s premier tenant-focused private real estate investment firm. With extensive brand and platform updates, we developed a corporate experience that speaks to their investors and partners as well a distinct, yet integrated, tenant-facing experience.

What We Did

  • Brand Identity
  • Strategy & Positioning
  • Copywriting & Content Strategy
  • Art Direction
  • Web Design

What We Made

A collage of website screenshots for Beacon properties, showcasing various buildings and campuses. The images feature modern architecture and interiors, including "Campus," "Spring House Innovation Park," "44 Montgomery," "303 East Wacker," and more.

Beacon is a private real estate investment firm with a 75-year legacy of successful real estate development, management, and transformation. They have a national footprint that covers 13 markets, with $13 billion of investment assets under management. With a business encompassing multiple (and always growing) audiences, markets, buildings, and programs, Beacon’s brand and platforms were in need of a cohesive and flexible update. We designed a system that would serve their discrete audiences of investors and tenants, showcase their properties, people, and expertise, and define and express their values.

A collage of images featuring two professionals, a woman in a brown blazer and a man in a dark suit, cityscapes with tall buildings, and a group working at a table reviewing documents. The images are set against a plain background.
Warm, community-forward photography by Lucy Hewett.

Beacon occupies a unique position. For their client market of progressive thinkers and innovative creators, Beacon helps drive innovation, designing environments that support breakthroughs and spark creativity. At the same time, Beacon serves as a trusted steward for their own investors, thoughtfully and responsibly growing and maintaining a diverse property portfolio. The Beacon brand requires a sophisticated, balanced approach across aesthetics and language. Our redesign was audience-driven; appropriate for the pedigreed legacy and traditional investors as well as speaking to Beacon’s forward-looking, progressive side and innovative tenants.

Three different typeface samples with alphabetic characters and numerals. The typefaces are titled "Söhne," "Financier," and "Söhne Breit."
A detail from the brand guidelines.


We then applied the new brand to touchpoints that met the needs of these key audiences, expanding into investor and tenant interfaces and a property spotlight microsite system. Thanks to naturalistic photography, elegant typography, and insightful, steady language, a user anywhere in the Beacon digital space gets an immediate sense of their vision and expertise. Workplaces are differentiated and clearly tied to brand pillars for a holistic experience of Beacon’s unique approach to property acquisition and management. We positioned the buildings as a community as well as a portfolio, which reinforces Beacon’s value proposition for tenants.


A sequence of four smartphone screens displaying information about a modern building as social media images. The screens reveal a trivia question about the location of the building, hinting it's in the birthplace of modern architecture, and confirming the building is in Chicago, IL.

Our content strategy reinforces the editorial feel via newsy features that highlight notable business developments. A calm, almost minimalistic, yet inspired voice feels right for a limited, manageable publishing schedule.

Beyond the core sites, we built further capabilities to support Beacon’s growing portfolio of multi-building “campus” style properties. With a full-featured template, these specific properties are able to be robustly spotlighted.


A collage of three images: Left - person working on a laptop. Middle - list of amenities including bike storage, conference center, and more next to images of a breakfast and a meeting. Right - four people engaged in a discussion around a table near large windows.

Different sites for the corporate and tenant experiences is not an approach everyone takes in the market. It can add complexity, requiring marketing sophistication, disciplined scaling, and consistent follow-through. But with thoughtful technical tweaks, we were able to unify everything in the Beacon brand universe, ensuring that the updated system would be flexible throughout longterm use. We overhauled infrastructure to support marketing efforts across all the main channels and offshoots via a centrally managed source, and implemented a property stacking plan with Beacon branding and real-time integration with VTS (the best-in-class platform for property availabilities).

As a result of our redesign strategy, Beacon’s tenant-facing digital presence has been solidified as a key piece of their platform—and a notable differentiator. With a new foundational brand that blends the business’s dual pillars of heritage and innovation as complementary strengths, Beacon is ready to build the future of work.

Don’t miss the next phase of our work to grow and deepen the Beacon brand experience—Shift by Beacon.

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