Graphic design agency in Chicago

Because at Bruno, the visual identity grows out of a positioning written before the first sketch, which gives every shape a reason to exist. The art directors are staff, never freelancers, and stay your contacts through delivery. The agency’s work has earned around thirty awards, including Awwwards and the CSS Design Awards. In the city of the New Bauhaus, an identity that can explain itself starts ahead.

Bruno runs Chicago projects from San Francisco, at 415 Mission St, and calls on Paris when the brand is European; it has no office in Illinois. Chicago is two hours ahead of California, so video calls land comfortably inside your working day. Your comments go straight to the art director, with nobody summarizing them along the way.

Graphic design at Bruno starts with strategy: one sentence that says what the brand promises, and to whom. The art directors then explore several visual identity routes, each presented with its reasoning, and roll out the one you choose across your real materials. The final guidelines work like a user manual. They’re meant to be opened on a Monday morning, not displayed.

For Work With Island, which makes acoustic office pods, Bruno created a brand that draws on both the Bauhaus and mass-market codes, right through to its online store. For Celeres, which builds software for mission-critical systems in space and defense, the identity had to say total reliability. The first one should strike a chord with anyone raised on the New Bauhaus.

Yes. Bruno designed the UX for Uber Works, the app tested with Chicago restaurant owners to help them hire staff at short notice. Mockups were sent over, they tried them, talked through their reactions out loud, and the changes followed right after. The agency kept the method: design as close as possible to the people who’ll actually use the product, even several time zones away.

Bruno gives each brand a visual language of its own, one people can spot even with the logo covered. For LegalPlace, it’s a freehand illustration style drawn by our own team, which you pick out on TV or in the Paris metro. Elsewhere it might be a typeface, a pattern or a way of framing photos. Try it: cover the logo on your latest ad. If people still know it’s you, you’re in good shape.

Bruno counts on two to three months on average to build a graphic identity, from strategy to rollout. But every project has its own pace: an identity that also has to work inside a digital product needs more testing, and a large approval committee adds weeks. With Chicago, the time difference barely slows anything down. Two hours is about the length of a lunch.