After seeing our wooden Core Value medallions at Saxby’s, Rick Nucci, CEO of Guru, approached us with a novel challenge: interweave the unexpected combination of a naturalistic wooden element with an ultramodern LED glow in order to create a brand sign that would stand out, literally and figuratively, at the Guru headquarters in the heart of Philadelphia.

Guru is reinventing the way teams capture knowledge, providing access to verified information from experts on your team, where you work and when you need it most. Whether you are on a call, in your inbox, or in your CRM, Guru is a layer of knowledge that lives where you work. Have confidence that verified information from experts on your team is right at your fingertips. Guru is founded by successful SaaS innovators Rick Nucci and Mitchell Stewart and is based in Old City, Philadelphia.

Oat Foundry got the chance to expand our sign-building capacities and work in new mediums with this neat project from Guru, an innovative, Philadelphia-based developer helping companies to centralize team knowledge and streamline employees’ information-gathering and workflows. We were tasked with recreating the Guru emblem in a totally unique way: through finding a means by which to scale and replicate the logo into a 24” x 48” sign, using materials that fit the stylistic bill while also providing for diffusion of LED lighting.

We brought smoked and clear acrylic, wood, stainless steel standoffs, and an LED lighting system into the mix for this project, working with Adobe Illustrator to scale the dimensions and our own twelve hands and six brains to find the best way to achieve the results that the guys at Guru had sketched out in initial consultations. Our primary design challenge was coming up with a way to configure the LED wiring between the wooden and acrylic lettering panels while keeping the sign streamlined and allowing for ideal light reflection (plus, as a bonus, providing an easy way to change the LED color in the future).

The end result? Guru sign glowing like a couple of kids in love (and a happy client – we’re into that, too).