You can build almost anything into a branded space now.
Interactive kiosks. Touchscreens that respond to a wave of the hand. Projection that reshapes a wall on cue. Objects 3D-printed on demand. Environments that reconfigure around the person standing inside them. The toolkit for building an experience has never been deeper.
And yet, you can walk into a space with every one of those tools in action, and still feel nothing at all.
That’s the tension running through branded environments right now. The more you’re able to build, the easier it becomes to build something impressive that doesn’t actually connect. So what makes a brand experience worth experiencing?
An art director, senior graphic designer, and illustrator, Amy Turner Senftleben is the kind of designer who’s had her hands on a whole variety of those brand experiences. Websites, environments, swag, print, storefronts — she’s loved the range of possibilities her career provides her.
While she’s currently running her own freelance business and contracting with M Agency, Amy’s spent decades across retail, environmental, and experiential agencies, led a soup-to-nuts in-house creative team at an independent school, and even co-founded her own social stationery business featured on Oprah’s “O List.”
But for Amy, the success of it all still comes down to one thing.
The human element.
Not a mood or a nicety, but a craft — one she’s spent 25 years learning to build on purpose.
The Medium Changed. The One Thing That Matters Didn’t.
Amy began her career journey with a clear goal in mind: to become an advertising art director. After completing her studies in Communications and Advertising at Boston University, she moved to The Big Apple in the late ’90s, landing at an agency built around retail and environmental design — her first taste of designing for real, physical space.
A couple of years in, she moved to another agency all about experiential design — and something clicked. The work was different every time: not a magazine page or a billboard, but environments and interactive experiences — something, as she puts it, more 360.
That’s the world where, as she describes it, anything is a possibility. “You’re literally dreaming up something unique each time,” she says, “which can be intimidating, but is also really exciting.”
From the very start, Amy lived at the seam where a big idea meets the physical constraints of actually building it. That’s the discipline the rest of her career is built on.
When she started, digital marketing wasn’t even a thing. Experiential design might have meant handing out flyers and inviting people to a custom space. Now people move through, touch, and respond to environments in ways that simply didn’t exist before. More products, more possibilities, more ways to build an experience — and, as she’s honest to point out, “there’s a plus side and downside.”
Because underneath all the new capability, the fundamentals never actually moved.
“An experiential design is still three-dimensional. You’re walking into it. How do you feel in that space? What are you encountering? What’s the human element?” she says. “That’s the part that hasn’t changed.”
That’s the frame everything else hangs on. The tools multiply. The question a person asks when they walk through the door — how does this make me feel? — stays exactly the same.
Possible Isn’t The Same As Right.
Here’s where Amy’s perspective turns into a discipline.
When a brand experience feels cold, a common instinct is to blame what’s in it — the fixtures, the screen, the format.
But Amy’s point is that warmth or coldness isn’t a property of the thing. It’s a property of the choices. “An experiential design is still three-dimensional. You’re walking into it. How do you feel in that space?” The materials, the palette, the light, the language — every one of those is a lever on that feeling, and every one is a decision someone makes on purpose.
That’s true even of the coldest surface in the room. “How can you make something that’s super tech feel more human?” she asks. “Whether it’s your copywriting, the language you’re using, the tone.”
A screen isn’t warm or cold on its own — the words on it, the voice it speaks in, the care underneath it decides that. And what’s true of a screen is truer of everything softer around it: the color on the wall, the finish underfoot, the way a space is lit.
She’s watched brand experiences lean on capability for its own sake, and she pushes back on the assumption that more is better: “As people become more reliant on tech and there are more ways to separate people, maybe there’s even more value in the human element.“ The more mediated an experience gets, the more humanity has to be built in on purpose — because it won’t arrive by accident.
For anyone working in EGD, that’s the whole game. “Just because something is possible,” she says, “doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right solution for your problem.”
The question was never technology versus warmth. It’s whether every choice in the space — the material, the light, the surface, the words — is answering to how it makes a person feel.
You Don’t Need a Person to Make a Space Feel Human.
And here’s the turn that makes Amy’s point genuinely useful — because it would be easy to hear “human element” and assume it means a human. A greeter. A person in the room.
It doesn’t.
Amy’s favorite proof is a brand she interacts with constantly and never once in person: Imperfect Foods, the grocery service that delivers the “ugly” produce supermarkets pass over.
“It’s completely no personal interaction at all,” she says, “but the experience with that brand is warm and fuzzy and comfortable, and I feel good about it.”
Pull that experience apart and there’s no person anywhere in it — just design decisions. An easy, intuitive website. Warm, friendly illustrations. Language that speaks directly to her desire to do right by the planet. A simple, one-color-printed kraft box that feels natural in the hand the moment it lands on her doorstep. Every one of those is a craft choice. Together, they do the work a person would.
“I feel connected to this brand even though I don’t see a single person, nor do I interact with anyone,” she says. “You can communicate a lot about a brand through tactile experiences. Even if it’s not a person delivering the message, you can influence the way someone feels about that brand.”
It’s the kind of thing you only really notice if you’ve worked across every category design touches — which, as her career attests, Amy has. That range taught her to see design as one connected system, not a stack of separate deliverables.
“Design goes beyond one category,” she says. “It’s going to be necessary in so many different areas of your business — from your stationery to your building to your website. It’s multidimensional.”
The feeling a brand gives you isn’t produced by any single touchpoint. It’s produced by all of them agreeing.
The human element, in other words, is engineered — not by a person, but by design decisions pulling in the same direction across every surface a brand touches.
The Feeling Starts With Color.
So how do you actually build that feeling into a physical space?
“I would start with color, always,” Amy says — the fastest, most subconscious way to tie a space back to a brand.
From there, the discipline is restraint. Pick three or four core colors, keep the finishes simple, and a space reads as calm and intentional instead of busy.
She compares it to a garden: throw in too many different plants and the whole thing stops working. Kept simple, a space feels soothing — and the way it feels is the entire point.
That same brand fluency carries into every surface. Signage pulls in the typography and fonts, but the real depth comes when materials — textiles, rugs, custom wall finishes — align with the rest of the brand system. Bring in a distinct photographic or illustrative style, and the environment suddenly speaks with real authority.
The same logic runs through all other tactile experiences, and — maybe most underrated — light. On a lobby project Amy is designing right now, that’s exactly the conversation, happening one lighting decision at a time. Working alongside SuperGraphics’ own Zac Thorpe, the questions on the table are about feeling, not spectacle: “Would it add lighting to a space that needs it? Would it create a cozy feeling? Do you want something more energetic?”
Illuminate one surface from behind and you haven’t added technology for its own sake — you’ve changed the emotional temperature of the whole room. “If you’re bringing in fixtures or materials that might be illuminated,” she says, “that can impact the energy in a space.”
That’s the human element, delivered through a deliberate choice from the experiential toolkit.
Why She Keeps Landing Here: Empathy First.
Ask Amy what actually makes someone good at this line of work, and she doesn’t start with software knowledge or the ability to keep up with trends. She starts with empathy.
“Being a good designer is a lot about empathy,” she says — “trying to put yourself in the shoes of who your client is trying to reach, and really thinking about what obstacles that person might be encountering.”
That’s why she insists design can’t kick off with no context. It has to follow a real understanding of the person and the problem. It’s a philosophy she sums up in a line from her own portfolio: Great design is the icing on the strategic layer cake.
“You have to start with strategy,” she says. “Good design for the sake of just having something beautiful doesn’t really cut it.”
And critically — for Amy, the human element isn’t the soft part of the job. It’s the craft part. She’s the designer who lights up over how a thing actually gets built. “I’ve always really enjoyed the production side,” she says. “That, to me, is almost as much fun as the design part — figuring out how to get it done.”
Put those instincts together — empathy for the person, strategy before aesthetics, and a genuine love of the physical execution — and her conviction stops looking like a preference and starts looking like a method.
She protects the human element because she’s spent 25 years watching it be the one variable that decides whether a space connects or just exists.
The Tools Will Keep Changing. The Job Doesn’t.
Amy’s career spans a near-total transformation in what’s technically possible inside a branded space. Her throughline is a useful correction for a field with more tools than ever.
Ask what the technology is for. The capability is not the goal. The feeling is. Every element of the brand should be in service of how a person experiences the space.
The human element can be engineered. It isn’t a person in the room. It’s color, material, tone, tactility, and light — the craft choices, working together across every touchpoint, that make someone feel something before anyone says a word.
Start with empathy. Understand the person first. The design, and every technical decision under it, follows from there.
Because the tools will keep changing. They always have. The one thing that decides whether a space actually lands — how it makes a person feel — hasn’t moved in 25 years. And it isn’t going to.
The Human Part Is the Physical Part. Let’s Build It.
At SuperGraphics, we’re proud to partner with creatives like Amy, who truly understand how branded experiences can foster connection. From large-format environmental graphics to the substrates, finishes, and installation that carry the feeling, we help bring those human experiences to life with the precision, craft, and white-glove service the work demands.
Curious how SuperGraphics can help your next environment connect?
