The Nugget: A Telluride Restoration Story

Director Sara Hirsh Bordo was filming a documentary about an iconic building in Telluride, Colorado — a place known simply as The Nugget. She needed a team to help her communicate the essence of the film through its opening titles. We partnered with Sara and her team to develop the visual identity that would set the tone for the entire documentary.

The work required something uncommon: we worked directly with the original architectural blueprints of the building. Not recreations. Not digital approximations. The real historical documents, hand-drawn, aged, full of the kind of detail that only time and dedication can produce.

That decision shaped everything. The design of the opening titles became inseparable from the spirit of the building itself, meticulous, layered, deeply human. Every element was treated with the care of a restoration, because that's exactly what this was. A place with a hundred years of history, asking to be seen and felt by a new audience.

The result is a set of opening titles that don't just introduce a film. They invite you into a world.

This wasn't just a title sequence. It was a collaboration built on trust, ensuring every frame reflected Sara's vision, her values, and the weight of the story she was telling.

Reaching the final design system was the result of extensive exploration. Across numerous client conversations, meetings, and rounds of feedback, we tested a broad range of directions, many of which were ultimately set aside, but each one added depth to the process and helped sharpen the final result into something more deliberate and refined.

Projects like this are a reminder of why we do this work, flexing our range across identity, strategy, creative direction, animation, and design to craft expressive visuals powered by strong technical execution.

Working alongside Sara, we pushed past the obvious to create something that feels both intentional and instinctive. This isn't just an opening title sequence listing names, it's the voice of a building, a piece of the community's soul.