Building personality through wayfinding
As architects and designers blur the line between signage and space, brands are using wayfinding to tell stories and shape experiences. David Benady explores how.
Finding your way around a spacious modern office building can be a delight, as designers use ever more imaginative approaches to help people arrive at their destinations. Hand-painted floor numbers outside lifts and colour-coded wall designs aid orientation inside these vast corporate cathedrals. Bespoke pictograms do away with words to direct you to huddle areas, cafes, printers, loos, hot desks and boardrooms. Wavy squiggles on walls draw you along corridors and up and down stairs. Navigating offices has never been such fun.
No longer simply a series of harsh signs with arrows pointing the way, wayfinding is injecting emotion, playfulness, inclusivity and branding into our office journeys.
“Wayfinding is more than getting you from A to B,” says Molly Goldby, a designer at global strategy and design studio Dalziel & Pow. “It has the power to build an experience. It’s not just finding the route – but enjoying the journey as well.”
A shift from purely instructional signage to a more brand-led approach has brought artist collaborations, murals and ‘hidden’ cues, to put users at the heart of corporate wayfinding, she says. This creates intuitive journeys around office spaces and helps shape a building’s personality through materials, colour, shapes and references to the location.
“The purposeful merging of architecture and wayfinding has the power to create meaningful experiences,” she adds.
The use of extraordinary artistic features in office designs has been employed by London and New York based agency Acrylicize, which uses artwork for storytelling and brand expression in public spaces. The agency has developed a design system for Spotify’s offices globally, using a series of murals by local artists from each location to both unify and differentiate each Spotify office. This has blended with the wayfinding strategy to aid navigation. Using a set of bespoke icons with a human and friendly feel and employing colour as a directional aid, Spotify’s office wayfinding is part of a holistic storytelling approach.
As Acrylicize lead designer Gavin Boorman says, “We are helping people to navigate these often enormous, multi-level buildings which, if you went in, wouldn’t feel intuitive at all. The aim is making you feel that you are very much in a Spotify building, with each floor having its own identity, but feeling connected as a whole.”
Expressing a brand in a space is a core part of the agency’s work.
“We see wayfinding as another opportunity to bring an artful interpretation of a brand to life in a space. The key for us is when all of those moments speak to one another as well, and all the elements act as a cohesive scheme," adds Boorman.
Working with advertising giant WPP in 16 of its global offices, the agency has helped design interiors that highlight local craft and culture through artwork, brand experiences and wayfinding. Elements of consumerism and media are woven into the designs, reflecting WPP’s work in advertising. Custom-made wayfinding systems help staff navigate WPP’s vast campuses, using hand painted floor numbers at Sea Containers House in London, boxes stacked like a totem pole pointing out directions in Amsteldok in Amsterdam and a variety of imaginative wayfinding touchpoints embedded in designs across the offices.
Branding the journey
Wayfinding has changed dramatically since the pandemic as staff blend working from home with occasional days at the office. Today, hot desking requires sophisticated systems to locate desks, which often involves using mobile apps. At the same time, inclusivity is becoming ever more important, with signage and directions needing to be easily grasped by people with a variety of understandings.
At the heart of any wayfinding system is trust, says Zoë Barrett, wayfinding director at DNCO. When getting on the tube, you naturally assume that the system will hold your hand all the way to your final stop, however many changes you make. Likewise, when you enter a building, whether it's a museum or a private headquarters. "It's a system you have to trust and buy into, so it has to be clear, coherent and consistent which are the three golden rules of wayfinding," she says, adding, "Wayfinding is the quiet force that turns chaos into order." At the same time, the orientation system helps define a space's identity, deepen its character and amplify a sense of place. "It's about purpose, not just process.”
This can be seen in the varying demands made by the end users – not the developers, architects or designers, but the office occupants. DNCO has created wayfinding for several offices of a global social media company in the UK and globally.
Barrett explains, “The wayfinding is deliberately paired back black and white because the interior design and architecture are so bold. By having something very clean and pared back as a user, it helps with the clarity.”
For other clients, the agency works closely with the interior architects to understand the visual aesthetic for the buildings. “We've designed a system that looks like it could have been made by the same hand. It’s important that it is in harmony with what's there,” she says.
From the ground up
Effective wayfinding should be baked into projects early on, so that it springs from the interior design. Wayfinding agencies are working earlier and more closely with interior designers, architects, branding specialists and others involved in corporate spaces.
This can be seen at the BBC, where wayfinding is about more than simple signage and looks to offer empathy, emotion, inclusivity and clarity. Michael Davies, head of GRAPHIC:SR, the environmental graphics and wayfinding division of architects Sheppard Robson, says the aim is to “make the navigation something people feel rather than just read.”
His team has helped shape the wayfinding by working closely with Sheppard Robson, the interior architects. The work at BBC Broadcasting House, BBC Cymru Wales in Cardiff and beyond has created orientation through the fabric of the buildings, rather than applying signs as “stick on plastic.” Davies says the graphics are “within the flesh of the building”, where colour, light and imagery are used for navigational cues, not simply decoration. Each floor may carry a distinct hue, different sides of a building reflecting a different identity. “As you start your journey, it creates an imprint of where you are, subliminally, and it plants you within the building,” says Davies.
Until a few years ago, a sharp division existed between residential, office, retail, leisure and entertainment spaces but this is blurring as patterns of work, shopping and leisure overlap.
“These changes are transforming the way buildings are structured so we need flexible approaches to directing people as they flow through public spaces,” says Wesley Meyer, creative director of wayfinding and design agency f.r.a.
The agency created wayfinding at Borough Yards, a warren of Victorian arches, alleys and squares near London Bridge station. The development blends office space with high-end retail, food and beverage outlets and an Everyman cinema. The wayfinding is playful and reflects the history of the space. Passing leisure visitors are attracted into the complex with a glimpse through an alley of a large neon sign, featuring words associated with Victorian London.
Pathways and agendas
Meyer calls the project at Borough Yards ‘wanderfinding’ where people gradually wend their way through, discovering new things and exploring the space.
He posits a division within wayfinding between objective and subjective systems. “There’s an assumption that wayfinding is objective and benevolent – but it often has an agenda, is very subjective and it is not just there for the greater good,” he says.
He points to the Legible London local wayfinding pillars placed around London as an example of objective, benevolent wayfinding, there simply to help people navigate – he calls this “the global gold standard for objective wayfinding.”
“But outside of these benevolent systems, most wayfinding systems are biased to a client or a cause. For instance, ‘exit through gift shop’ – that may not be the most efficient exit, but it is the one the sign wants you to take to get you to spend money. It has an agenda.”
This also applies to office buildings, where organisations want to inspire their staff and get them to think in certain ways about their employers. They want visiting suppliers and investors to walk certain routes to show off innovative workspaces and art collections. The aim is for visitors to gain an overall impression of the occupant’s broader values and vision.
Design, he points out, is about changing people’s behaviour and getting them to feel a certain way. Corporate wayfinding is part of this process, helping to fuel certain beliefs about a building’s occupants.
Wayfinding’s functional challenge is to balance the varying needs of thousands of users – some go into the office every day and soon find their way around, while others visit only occasionally, so need detailed navigational help. Of course, it’s hard to please everyone, and some users complain that signage is too vague, while others feel it is too obtrusive.
To achieve the right balance, disciplines such as environmental graphics, interior design, architectural design, wayfinding and space branding are working closely to create subtlety and longevity as well as clarity.
Jo Rowan, associate director for strategy at designers Priestman Goode, says that wayfinding is one of the first touchpoints most people encounter in a building, so it is very impactful. “Everyone is striving to offer elevated experiences, and wayfinding is an opportunity for brands to inject their DNA into the space and create a sense of place and have a kind of uniqueness,” she says.
Wayfinding in the new mega office complexes is creating environments where route finding inspires staff, offers aesthetic pleasure and adds the occasional hint of humour. So even if you do get lost in some cavernous office block, finding your way out will be a joyous exploration of the occupant’s brand values.
This article was taken from Transform magazine Q4, 2025. You can subscribe to the print edition here.
