OUGD406: Studio Brief 03 - Exhibition Branding (Wayfinding Research)

Having done way finding in the past with a previous brief of when I redesigned the way finding for the Trinity shopping centre in Leeds, there was a lot of what I learnt during that brief that I thought I could apply to doing the way finding for this exhibition.

One piece of way finding that we observed as a group was Barbican's as we felt this was a good example of how could go about doing the way finding in terms of the considerations, such as colour contrast, the weight of the typeface used etc.

One main thing I wanted to bare in mind was to keep the contrast between the type and background colours high to ensure full visibility from a distance. The height at which the signage is placed is also something to bare in mind as too low and it could obstruct people walking by and too high and it would result in people having to strain their necks to look high up to find where to go.

Another consideration is the budget of the exhibition, it may be all well and good to create an extravagant piece of signage to display and although this may work it may not necessarily be affordable. One thing I've found that is a constant through a lot of exhibitions and even within last years 'Chapter 4/5' exhibition was using vinyl on the walls, floors or even ceilings. The main reason behind this is that it's cheap, affordable and also easy to design and manipulate to the surrounding space rather than having to work with a large scale set of signs.

When creating the way finding I also had to ensure that it fit in with the current branding we had for the exhibition up to this point. This meant that the designs couldn't be too extravagant but instead had to follow on from the designs we already had.