Museum wayfinding system · 2024

Finding your way through four buildings

A wayfinding system that renames the floors, colors each building, and puts decisions only where visitors actually stop, from the entrance map down to small blade signs at every junction.

Client: Harbor Museum of Craft
By: Tomasz Reyes
Timeline: 9 months
Year: 2024

A freestanding steel totem sign with colored building bands in a stone hall — Fig. 01 / 05A weighted totem in the original 1890s hall.

The problem

The museum grew into four connected buildings with three floor numbering schemes. Visitors asked the front desk for directions more than anything else.

My role

Environmental graphic designer, with the museum's facilities team

Constraints

Two of the buildings are historic, and nothing could be drilled into original masonry.
Signage had to work for visitors who read no English, so pictograms carry the load.
The fabrication budget was fixed before the design started.

Decision 01

Watched where people stopped

Spent six weekend days logging every point where a visitor paused, turned around, or asked staff.

Why

The old signs were placed by floor plan logic. The new ones had to be placed by behavior.

A simplified map of four connected buildings, each in its own color — Fig. 02 / 05The entrance map: four buildings, four colors, one level scheme.

Decision 02

Renamed the floors once, everywhere

One continuous level scheme, Level 0 to Level 3, across all four buildings.

Why

Three numbering schemes meant the same stair could take you from Floor 2 to Level 1. No sign can fix that.

A grid of custom pictograms for stairs, lift, café, toilets, and galleries — Fig. 03 / 05Twenty-four pictograms drawn on one grid.

Decision 03

Gave each building a color, not a name

Four colors, used on maps, signs, and the floor directory, with names kept small.

Why

Visitors remembered "the blue part" long before they remembered the donor names on each wing.

A projecting blade sign at a corridor junction pointing to two buildings — Fig. 04 / 05Blade signs only where people stopped in our observation logs.

Decision 04

Freestanding signs in the historic halls

Weighted steel totems instead of wall mounts in the two older buildings.

Why

It respected the masonry and let the facilities team move a sign when an exhibition changed the route.

A floor directory panel listing Level 0 to Level 3 across four colored buildings — Fig. 05 / 05The floor directory, Level 0 to Level 3, read across all four buildings.

The outcome

Installed in September 2024. The museum's front desk logged direction questions for the four weeks before and after: they fell from about 310 a week to about 120.

Next: Relaykit, saas onboarding flow

An illustrative case study. Tomasz Reyes and Harbor Museum of Craft are fictional, and so are the numbers, which stand in for figures a real designer would supply. Casepanorama never invents them.