Responses by Adam Brodsley and Eric Heiman, principals and creative directors, Volume.
Background: When Sobrato Real Estate purchased an old cannery building in Palo Alto with the intent to restore it as a LEED-Platinum, Class-A office space, it also bought a significant piece of California history. Thomas Foon Chew was a prominent industrialist and the owner of the Bayside Canning Company, which he built into a powerhouse after taking the reins from his father following the 1906 earthquake. He nurtured Bayside from a small tomato-packing business into the nation’s third-largest canning company, earning considerable wealth and respect during a challenging era for Asian Americans.
Sobrato engaged Volume to conceive of a way to honor this history, and with the help of the community of Palo Alto and Foon Chew’s living descendants, we created two exhibit installations to tell this important, rich story.
Design thinking: We wanted the design’s formal qualities to feel very “site specific” to the newly renovated Cannery building while being informed by the its past. The physical forms hark back to Foon Chew’s business of canning through the outdoor totem and fruit and vegetable crates with the interior exhibit, while the graphic language runs the gamut from the literal historic of the old can labels to the contemporary through informational typography, bridging the gap between past and present.
Challenges: Wrangling content for these kinds of projects is always time consuming. We want to ensure all the history is correct and is written clearly for a mass audience. And then adjusting—if not restoring—the archival imagery so it can be used at these large scales.
Favorite details: How all the elements of the totem came together as a whole—first the three-dimensionality and then the graphics. It was more complex than it might seem just looking at it cold.
New lessons: This whole history was new to us. That’s the fun of these content-rich design projects—we learn so much!
Visual influences: For these history-forward projects, we’re always looking for a balance between honoring that history and translating it for the present day. The visual system uses more contemporary typography that references the specific historical era but is still squarely contemporary, helping complement the historical imagery.
Time constraints: We had to have the exhibition finished by the big ribbon-cutting in May 2026. But we started in late 2023, so we had time to really get the content and construction considerations just right.
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