DAV STUDIO

Quid was expanding in 2018 and needed a new home. They were able to secure the entire 23rd floor of the iconic One California building in San Francisco; an early home to Salesforce, among others. Quid’s CEO enlisted Dav Studio to design their new HQ. In the tech world there is a growing awareness that the digital miracles we see every day are the product of insights first recorded in dusty books. Quid is a company that has long acknowledged digital’s debt to analog and in fact has built its data analytics on recognition of that connection. Quid is an AI startup in San Francisco and has the leading web product for visualizing written content.  Quid allows users to quickly "turn text into context" for making business decisions. The founder and CEO, Bob Goodson, came up with the idea as a graduate student at the University of Oxford while researching the nature of language.

Our design for Quid’s San Francisco office celebrates the ongoing progression of knowledge with a 21st century space framed in accents drawn from the world of print. Quid is dedicated to break-throughs in how we "read" content. This concept was translated in Quid’s elevator lobby. We sourced an old edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and used the pages as wallpaper, leading every guest to essentially enter Quid through a room of nothing but tens of thousands of words—a nod to founder Bob Goodson’s alma mater. We hid the entry for the word "Quid" in the lobby as something for guests to try to find. Spoiler: the primary definition of Quid is the truth of a thing. 

Past the elevator lobby is the main reception. We approached a local Berkeley print press and sourced the actual linen material used on book covers and covered the reception walls. Guests can touch the walls and are reminded of the caress of a good book. Throughout the office Dav Studio and Quid together stocked bookshelves—often strictly metaphoric in a modern workplace— with real books of real interest to the company’s employees. We selected a color palette that reflects the Quid product itself. Quid detects topics and colors each differently. So each room has a color and as you move through the space it reflects the movement through the software itself. We also brought in network graphics into select places as further echoes of the product.

Quid has 100 inventions and 15 approved patents, so innovation is key to the people working there. A key to innovation is ensuring team members from all parts of the company come together and talk every day. For this reason, Dav Studio and Quid created a "cafe" in which everyone can eat, drink and work, and called it "Hopscotch Cafe" in the spirit of having fun with numbers. Hopscotch also respects the creativity that can flow in cafe environments. “Most revolutions in history started in cafes. More and more people seek to work from cafes so we borrowed ideas from the best Bay Area cafes, including the company-sourced selection of music playlist which plays throughout the day,” says Bob Goodson. Quid aspired to a space that is both highly functional from their 100+ person team to work and create, inspirational for clients and guests, and deeply reinforces the product and brand values that Quid follows. 

The larger theme here is not print, but continuity—the way every generation of knowledge seekers builds on the achievements of generations before. That’s true also of designers. Dav Studio uses the vernacular of office design today as the starting point for a warmer, more tactile working experience at Quid. Giving every space its own connection to a larger meaning—through cultural reference or individual choice—our design turns a tech office into a personal habitat.