Corporate & information design

CBRE: turning dense corporate data into clear visual stories

RoleGraphic Designer
TeamMarketing, stakeholders
TimelineJun – Sep 2015
DeliverablesInfographics, sales materials, web banners, email campaigns
Summary

CBRE's sales materials had to communicate complex performance metrics to stakeholders — but the existing collateral suffered from information overload, weak visual hierarchy, and inconsistency across regions. As Graphic Designer, I turned dense market and consumer data into clear, modular infographics for sales materials, and kept the brand's digital presence current through web banner and email campaign design.

01Context

In commercial real estate, the numbers are the product: market performance, building economics, consumer research. But numbers only persuade when people can actually read them. CBRE's sales materials were dense with data that stakeholders had to work to extract — and each region formatted things its own way, diluting a brand built on authority and precision.

02What I did

  • Information hierarchy: restructured how content flows through sales materials, so key figures surface immediately instead of hiding inside dense pages — deciding what a stakeholder should see first, second, and last.
  • Data visualization: transformed intricate market and consumer data sets into bold, modular infographics — complex metrics made legible at a glance, without dumbing them down.
  • Reusable templates & visual guidelines: built flexible templates that kept sales materials and decks consistent — one visual voice across formats and regions.
  • Digital production: designed and maintained the website banners and email campaigns — my first sustained digital design work, where layouts had to perform on screens and in inboxes, not just on paper.

03The work

Research infographics — sales materials

Two research infographics, each starting from a dense data set — building statistics, rental economics, consumer behavior studies — and ending as a single page a stakeholder can absorb in a minute.

Two CBRE research infographics — Asian Supertalls and The Global Consumer Journey
CBRE research infographics — complex market data distilled into visual stories.
Infographic: The Emergence of Asian Supertalls — supertall office building data
The Emergence of Asian Supertalls — building counts by country, rental premiums, occupier mix, and tenant benefits, structured so the hierarchy reads top-down at a glance.
Infographic: The Global Consumer Journey — retail consumer behavior data
The Global Consumer Journey — consumer behavior research turned into a connected, step-by-step visual narrative from online search to in-store decision.

Digital — web banner design

CBRE Global Research website banner — Asia Pacific Investor Intentions Survey 2015, shown on laptop
Website banner for CBRE Global Research — Asia Pacific Investor Intentions Survey 2015. Part of the ongoing digital work: keeping the research site's hero banners current with each new publication.

04Why this project matters

CBRE is where I learned that clarity is a design deliverable. Making a complex data set understandable at a glance — deciding hierarchy, cutting noise, guiding the eye — is the same discipline I later applied to product cards at Costco and market-specific layouts at Melaleuca. It's also where my work went digital: banners and email campaigns were the bridge from print into the screen-based design that became my career.

Numbers don't speak for themselves — someone has to design the way they're read. That job was mine.

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