Wayfinding Signage plays an essential part in helping your customers, visitors and contractors find where their way around a building, parking space and so on. Whether it’s to help direct traffic on a industrial site or guide the user to a specific landmark or area of interest, wayfinding is the perfect solution to help people navigate.
SMART wayfinding solutions are crucial for helping people find their way around schools, hospitals, office blocks, or shopping centres. Commercial wayfinding signs must offer a visual communication aid to help eliminate on-site confusion, through graphics or symbols, text or digital signs. They need to be clear and concise to allow the user to feel comfortable in what can sometimes be high-stress environments.
Our specialised in-house team of award-winning designers and site surveyors will work with you to help design a blueprint of your space that not only embraces your corporate identity, but helps everyone feel engaged with their surrounding area.
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Here are five things that wayfinding signage should accomplish
>> Embrace your corporate identity
Connecting your brand to your wayfinding solutions can help to introduce a personality. After all, it’s your story, your people and your culture (your brand). Your visual identity is just as important and needs to be portrayed across your signage. Linking your brand to the internal and external environment will give the user a sense of familiarity and consistency (which we will discuss below). Nowadays, expectations of physical settings are heightened, leaving very little room for sub-par design and poor directional support.
>> Be simple & informative
Think of wayfinding signage as an invisible hand guiding the user from wherever they are to their desired destination. Areas without a clear traffic flow can sometimes feel chaotic and create feelings of stress and anxiety, meaning that your signage needs to feature crucial information that is universally understood. By simplifying your signage, you give the user the information they are looking for without creating confusion. Overcomplicated designs, busy graphics, and clashing colours can detract away from the overall message you are trying to give.
>> Location Matters
Having an effective wayfinding system means that location is an essential piece to your signage puzzle. Our in-house site surveyors will assess all entrances, exits, specific landmarks and points of interest to help highlight a route and key positions for signage along the way. Generally, we are good at finding our way, but on a complex site or large open spaces, having wayfinding signage located in areas people expect to see them, like junctions or where a straight line deviates, will help the user to the next part of their journey.
>> Be eye-catching
Offering the right mix of innovative sign, graphics, and material solutions gives you creativity and endless possibilities for design. Having visually appealing signage will help gain the user’s attention and guide them in the direction they need to be. There is a real art to picturing how your signs will benefit the location and the people using them, and our innovative in-house designers will work closely with you to develop new or existing ideas. By offering you fully interchangeable signage that can be located on the ground, on a wall or suspended from above gives you maximum flexibility to help create the most eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing solution.
>> Consistency is key
Having consistency within your signage is paramount. From fonts, text, shapes and colours, this allows for a more distinguishable, user-friendly and recognisable sign. People need to feel confident that they are heading in the correct direction and keeping your signage consistent from the beginning, middle, and end can help reassure a visitor when they most require it.
Your wayfinding and directional signage won’t be limited to materials. With Hardy Signs, you can choose from a wide variety, such as acrylic, or vinyl, aluminium or Foamex. Depending on the location, we can advise which type would be the most suitable. Wherever feasible, we try to work with many different recycled and environmentally friendly materials and printers that are sustainably sourced. With low-cost options available, get in touch with Hardy Signs today for your wayfinding signage requirements.
About the company: Hardy Signs is a professional and digital signage company that designs, manufactures and installs bespoke signage products to a wide range of business sectors in the United Kingdom. The company has been awarded the manufacturer of the year in 2019 and 2020.
