EOYS - Signage & Way-finding Development

Having dropped our earlier planned signage that used hand portraits to point directions Liam and I set about designing signage with a focus on clarity - carrying the exhibitions art direction through the use of type. This makes the signage much more effective in its primary job whilst still appearing as part of the campaign. 

I began by designing the room markers for the respective courses. I chose Surface Pattern as it has the longest name (best to judge size etc). 

The first thing we needed to agree on was the use of Helvetica (body copy on the promo) for the course title or Futura heavy (Header type on promo): 

Liam and I both agreed that Futura is easily the better choice.  With this I knocked up a selection of different courses to show Marketing in our meeting on Tuesday. As you can see, each course is colour coded the same as on the exhibition map to aid navigation. 
From the below justifications we decided on centrally justified as it has the best balance regardless of the course name length.  

I also toyed with the idea of using the map colour for the whole sign (left) but this doesn't fit with the rest of the EOYS visual approach. Likewise the name of the course being in the map colour (centre) doesn't work because some are lost against the  grey background taken form the portraits themselves. This problem could also be said about the white type above so I tried an 80% black (right) that we used in other promo items and it works brilliantly.   

Final proposed course room door markers: 

Moving on from this agreed approach we set about mocking up hallway signage with the same approach. These proposed signs would hang from corridors ceilings at strategic points.
Again, a portion of the grey background has been used in the signage for continuity between all exhibition elements. Similar to before - white type is no good because of the light tone at the centre of the image. The course / map colours are also somewhat lost against it - no good. 

Switching to 80% grey helps this but still the arrows are lost.

Reverse the coloured arrows out of grey circles and bobs your unkle! Much much clearer. Indeed, much clearer than our hand portrait signage also. The use of our typographic treatment for the EOYS promo really does help bind the signage to the other elements and the colours for the colour coding add a sublte splash of colour to the signage, which would essentially be just grey without it. Boring. 

We will be taking these final signage proposals to our meeting with marketing on Tuesday. Once signed off they will act as a crib sheet for all of the signage in the exhibition. 

On that note - one thing we need to do is get a definitive room plan for the exhibition form Chloe so we can sign off the exhibition guide / map and work out the copy for all of the signage!