CampusParc, the entity that manages and operates The Ohio State University’s parking assets under a long-term lease, engaged students and faculty in the university’s Department of Design to determine how its brand, services, and parking environments can contribute to a more positive parking experience in garages and surface lots–particularly for visitors to the main campus. This year-long collaboration involved multiple design-definition sessions between design faculty and a CampusParc design strategy team, an 8-week graduate/undergraduate design-led summer workshop, and a full semester Advanced Visual Communication Design Studio course. The outcomes included discovery themes, user journey maps, observation findings, problem statements, design opportunity proposals, and concept prototypes. Throughout this process, the students worked with, presented to, and received feedback from design faculty and CampusParc representatives. Students engaged stakeholders, university staff, and transient (visiting) parkers. By immersing students into a complex practice-based project, the students applied their design research and service design thinking in environmental graphics and branding. CampusParc is realizing new design opportunities, embracing proposed design themes and concepts, and shifting their role from a ‘utility’ to a ‘service’ provider. This new mindset is contributing to CampusParc’s interest in enhancing relationship building and crafting a friendly and approachable brand language that interjects a sense of delight. This paper captures this collaboration and presents the student-led design solutions as a case study that can serve as a model for future professional academic collaborations.