Signage & Wayfinding
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Guiding People With Clarity and Purpose
Effective wayfinding is an essential infrastructure in the built environment. It shapes how people move, make decisions, and experience a space, often without ever drawing attention to itself.
We design comprehensive signage and wayfinding systems that integrate directional signage, directories, identification signage, ADA requirements, campus navigation, parking guidance, and environmental navigation strategies into a unified system that reinforces brand identity and spatial clarity.
Our process begins by analyzing circulation, decision points, and sightlines to identify where information is needed, where confusion occurs, and where design can improve flow and confidence. From there, we develop a custom system that aligns with architecture, brand standards, and real-world use conditions.
We collaborate closely with architects, developers, and owners throughout the design and documentation phases, ensuring systems are clear, buildable, and consistent from concept through installation.
At The Barton, this approach resulted in a refined wayfinding system that supports a complex residential environment with clarity and ease. At 816 Congress, we developed a signage program that balances high-traffic performance demands with a confident, professional brand presence.
A well-designed wayfinding system is invisible to the people it serves; they simply arrive where they need to be, and the space feels effortless.
Signage & Wayfinding
Projects
Questions we hear most
Answers from the team that designs, documents, fabricates, and installs the work.
Yes. Every interior signage program we design meets the 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design — raised tactile characters, Grade 2 braille, non-glare finishes, adequate contrast between character and background, and correct mounting height and location at the latch side of the door.
Compliance is a design input for us, not a final check. Permanent room identification, restrooms, elevators, exits, and areas of refuge each carry their own requirements, and the expensive mistakes happen when signage is specified late in a project, against a deadline, by someone reading the standard for the first time. We review code during design and document it in the drawings you approve, so the package that reaches fabrication is already correct — including on projects where a local jurisdiction or inspector applies the standard more strictly than the federal baseline.
ADA rarely arrives on its own. It is usually one requirement inside a larger wayfinding or identification scope, and we design it as part of that system rather than as a separate line item.
An analysis of how people move through the building and where they make decisions; a nomenclature and numbering system; a family of sign types from exterior identification through directories, directionals, room identification, and regulatory signage; a message schedule listing every sign and what it says; and location plans showing where each one goes. The signs themselves are the last and most visible part. The system is what makes them work together.
By designing from the decision points, not from the floor plan. We walk the routes a first-time visitor would take, identify every point where they have to choose, and place exactly the information needed there and no more. Full-size mockups are installed at critical locations before fabrication, so message size, mounting height, and sightlines are tested in the real space rather than assumed on paper.
Yes, and it is a large share of our work. A retrofit starts with an audit of what is there, what is missing, and what contradicts itself, then a program that can be installed in phases without closing the building. Medical City Healthcare replaced signage across 16 hospitals and multiple clinics this way, each site coordinated through its own municipal permitting process while the facilities stayed open.
The people reading it. Patients and families are often stressed, unfamiliar with the building, and moving under time pressure, so the wayfinding has to work for someone who is not paying full attention. On top of that sit code requirements, infection-control expectations for materials, and the reality that a hospital never closes for installation. We design for all of it, and we have replaced signage across 16 hospitals for Medical City Healthcare while the facilities operated.
Yes. Guest room identification is permanent room signage under the ADA Standards, so it needs raised tactile characters, Grade 2 braille, proper contrast, and correct mounting at the latch side of the door. That is compatible with a distinctive design — material, form, and finish are open — as long as the tactile and braille requirements are met. We design the room sign as part of the brand and check the code in the same drawing.
An entrance identity, usually a monument; vehicular and pedestrian wayfinding through the site; building and unit identification, which carries ADA requirements; amenity identification; parking and regulatory signage; and often leasing and branded graphics in the arrival sequence. The identity sets the tone of the property before anyone reaches the door, and the wayfinding decides whether a guest, a delivery, or an emergency responder can find a unit.
Yes. Unit identification, amenity rooms, and common-area signage in multifamily buildings are permanent room signage under the ADA Standards and, in most jurisdictions, Fair Housing accessibility rules. Tactile characters, braille, contrast, and mounting are all required, and they can be met within a design that suits the property. We check the code during design so the signs you approve are already compliant.