Place Branding

White paper | November 2009

Place Branding
Are we here yet?

White paper | November 2009 | Place Branding | 1

Shikatani Lacroix is a leading branding and design firm located in
Toronto, Canada. The company commissions assignments from all
around the world, across CPG, retail and service industries, helping
clients achieve success within their operating markets. It does this
by enabling its clients’ brands to better connect with their
consumers through a variety of core services including corporate
identity and communication, brand experience design, packaging,
naming and product design.

About the Author
Roberto Caruso, Account Manager.
A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Roberto brings
diverse industry experience and a strong project management
background to the SL account management team. He is extremely
detailed, and his drive and prowess working with multilevel budgets
has been instrumental in the design, coordination, and execution of
plans for such clients as the University of Calgary, Calgary Health
Region, Seneca College, and Toronto Airport Authority to name just
a few.

Roberto’s leadership and broad industry knowledge guarantee
superior client service, and he can always be counted on to
successfully coordinate and deliver projects on time, on budget and
to specification.


People and Spaces
Navigational
When walking through our urban spaces, parks, and recreation
Tools and centres, we often neglect to stop and look around. We should take
the time to notice design and the critical role it plays in establishing
wayfinding place branding as we travel during our daily lives.

systems establish If places were not branded with signage, how would we know when
we had reached our destination? How would we fully discover and
the feel of a place experience spaces? In environments ranging from large to small –
from shopping malls to airports – stop to think about why our clients
and a brand invest in designing the right wayfinding systems.

Place branding is an important means of heightening consumers’
awareness of their spaces and of distinguishing one venue from
another. Whether through graphical application, technology, or
traditional wayfinding techniques, navigational tools and wayfinding
systems establish the feel of a place and a brand, directly impacting
a visitor’s first impression and overall experience. Signage and
design also directly contribute to place branding because they can
provide a preview to all the experiences the space has to offer.
Done poorly and visitors become frustrated and disconnected; done
well, and wayfinding can reassure visitors while providing them with
additional information and a positive brand experience.


Different Strategies for Different Spaces

When designing great wayfinding systems, it’s important to ensure
that the overall look and feel of the signage matches the
surrounding environment: a park, for example, should have signs
that orient visitors quickly and identify the best routes particular to
that space, such as walking paths, trails and lookouts.

The remainder of this discussion will focus on how distinctive
branding strategies apply to specific types of public areas, such as
libraries, parks, and hospitals.

Public Spaces
Spaces that are open to the public are the fabric of wayfinding and
place branding. These spaces include an extremely wide range of
environments: parks, plazas, playgrounds, and the grounds of public
buildings; even college campuses and shopping malls. Each of these
spaces are used differently, and each should have their own
distinctive wayfinding system. For example, parks and malls each
serve different functions and therefore have different wayfinding
priorities.

A park is a social leisure space where people engage in activities
such as roller blading, hiking, or picnicking. Therefore, a park does
not require meticulous navigation; it just needs to reflect the
surrounding natural space. In a park setting, wayfinding usually ties
into nature through the choice of visual design and materials, such
as wood finishes. Nature-inspired icons and colourful zoning for the
activities found throughout the park are also effective.


People go to malls to do one thing: shop. We often go to the mall
knowing what we want, so when we arrive, the most important
navigational tool is found right as we enter the door: the multi- layer
skewed view map again uses colour as a coding system, but in a
different application. Here, it categorizes stores alphabetically and
locates them in the space by colour zones.

Each environment employs different wayfinding principles
depending on the environment’s purpose and characteristics. The
function of most spaces is to provide visitors with the ability to
complete tasks. These experiences fall within the general category
of recreation, which is becoming increasingly valuable in the
formation of our social environment.

Wayfinding and place branding strategies for public spaces include
the following tools and techniques:

• Design for the needs of the local residents
• Concentrate activities in a cohesive map
• Increase foot traffic through the space
• Maintain good community visibility from the exterior
• Section activity areas cohesively from a main path
• Arrange signs in a strategic and attractive manner
• Clearly define entrances
• Provide neighbourhood bulletin boards at entrances
• Provide ‘you are here’ signs at principle points
• Include directional signs to important locations or events


Case Study: Downsview Park

Toronto’s Downsview Park is part of an urban development
revitalization project that will last until 2015. This space will share the
land with new housing redevelopment, a botanical garden, lakes,
public paths, and recreational activities such as soccer and paintball.
Downsview Park will also host some of Toronto’s main public events
like Edgefest.

Branding is essential for differentiating the latest recreation centre
from other centres in the surrounding community, and for
distinguishing a newly developed recreational park from existing
spaces. Technology is a particularly useful tool for creating a
branding experience, and seems to be the preferred formula for
Downsview Park when it comes to capturing the future look and feel
of the space. LED screens offer a glimpse of how the revitalized
park will look through visual renderings of the future park, while
functioning as an upcoming community event board as well.

On its own, technology offers a variety of design and marketing
options, each with its own price tag. Lately, the use of LED screens
and scrolling media screens have been an acceptable choice in
terms of cost because this technology is purchased in units.
Downsview Park, for example, has worked with SLD to incorporate a
The use of led variety of different sized screens within their wayfinding program.
This strategy is preferred by our design team because whether
screens is one clients have allotted a small or a large budget for technology, LED
method of adding screens can be sized accordingly--without breaking the bank.

technology trend of We felt at SLD that in order to capture the variety of indoor and
outdoor events that happen all year round at the park, a flexible,
wayfinding interchangeable medium was required. To some it’s a new method
of navigation.


Learning Together
One of the most
The design of the library should reflect the needs of its users. If the
innovative wayfinding principle concern when designing libraries is to facilitate
book/information searching, “the searcher must quickly learn how to
strategies involves use the system in order to improve the chances of finding what is
using the environment sought. Wayfinding is not only important within the library; in many
cases it is also important in getting to the library” (Deasy, C.M, FAIA.
itself as a wayfinding Designing Places for People, pg. 70), This is especially true when
finding the library requires navigating your way through a busy
tool metropolitan university campus.

One of the most innovative wayfinding strategies involves using the
environment itself as a wayfinding tool. For example, the Taylor
Family Digital Library, designed by Kasian Architects, uses our
wayfinding ideas in design tied directly to the architectural
elements, yet uses a punch of colour so that you don’t miss the
signage.

Key wayfinding and place branding strategies to consider when
designing library and campus spaces include the following tools and
techniques:

• Provide library identification signs visible from any approach
• Clearly identify the entrance
• Place an information centre inside the entrance
• Provide ‘you are here’ maps at the entrance
• Provide identification signs for departments and sections
• Provide descriptive titles for zoning


Waylearning Through Icons an Symbols: Reinventing the
Traditional

SLD has coined the term “Waylearning” because we believe that
signage and wayfinding can do more than communicate place
names. Signage can enhance the visitor’s experience of the brand
and the surrounding environment. “Waylearning” is linked to types
of technology that can provide the consumer with visual
representations of features the particular space has to offer, and
directions to where they can be found. Essentially, through
technology, you can teach consumers to use visual cues, text,
symbols and digital maps to quickly orient themselves and confirm
their destination. This type of technology is also easily
interchangeable and perfect for Downsview Park, because as the
park transitions into to its new identity, the LED technology will
adapt easily in comparison to traditional static signs. By placing
LEDs strategically throughout a wayfinding program such as a park,
this technology can further enhance a place branding identity
program.

“Although the design profession works with different materials and
employs different techniques to solve their problems, they share the
same client--the human race--in common.” (C.M. Deasy, FAIA.
Designing Places for People, pg. 45)

Although LED screens will capture the viewer’s attention, there are
many other tools and techniques that effectively attract people to
places. Spaces are constructed to recreate the designer’s
visualization of the visitor’s experience. Whether in a recreation
centre or an arrival terminal at the airport, markers, marquees, icons
and symbols play a vital role in establishing a great wayfinding
program.


Hospitals: Symbols, Icons and Markers

In SLD’s experience, large general hospitals are the most complex
spaces for place branding and wayfinding. The hospital mix is so
rich and varied, and hospital activities are so fast-paced and
complex, that it is easy to understand why television audiences are
fascinated by the drama of the large general hospital environment.

Hospitals themselves seem to be getting larger—changing from
what was once a series of smaller buildings into a vast space that
sometimes spans two or three football fields in length.

Alberta Health Sciences is a new institutional building venture in
Calgary. It is approximately three football fields long, and it will not
be fully completed until 2025. How do you sign a future space that is
ever growing? Through the use of maps, symbols, icons, and
markers. Design a modular system that is easily updated and that
allows the hospital to add to each sign as each new department and
clinic is added. In Calgary, one of SLD’s senior wayfinding designers
is using symbols, icons, and markers as part of an interchangeable
system that works much like a subway map. SLD felt that this
technique could again use colour to zone the active areas open to
the public, and grey areas to represent sections of the hospital that
are yet to be developed. Symbols, icons, and markers appear all
along a promenade, which has markers like station names. However,
in this case zones are used to orient people, in a format like a block
in a neighbourhood. Each zone is broken down in sections along the
‘subway map’, directing visitors along the path to specific
neighbourhoods within the hospital.

Our design team considers what the consumer will see at entrances,
parking spaces, and areas that are not accessible in each phase.
Although it can be overwhelming to look at floor plans for spaces
that are three football fields long, and developed over a number of
years in phases, it helps to take a comprehensive look at immediate
signing needs and at what will be phased into the wayfinding
program over time. It is important for us to look at projects as a


whole, so all of the signage and messaging required is planned as
though the whole is building is in the first phase. Once this is
established, planners should start to block off the messages that
immediately apply and provide signage space for the future areas.
“hospitals must
“Hospitals must address the complex challenge of how to get a
address the complex variety of people with vastly different needs to and around a large
medical centre: visitors, patients, doctors, nurses, and support staff.
challenge of how to In hospitals, all of the challenges inherent to wayfinding are present;
designers must identify the site, including the approach and
get a variety of people entrance. If there is any confusion or uncertainty about these points,
it will inconvenience not only the patients, but also their friends and
with vastly different visitors” (Deasy, C.M, FAIA. Designing Places for People, pg. 102).
needs around a large
The following provides basics for hospital wayfinding:
medical centre…”
• If the site is large, post signs at all corners
• Identify the building with well illuminated signs
• Mark the staff, patient and visitor’s entrances with pylons and
illuminated signs
• Provide a highly visible entrance
• Develop a hospital plan that can be explained easily to
newcomers
• Provide a series of ‘you a here’ maps
• Provide comprehensive colours, symbols, and sign systems to
guide people through the hospital
• Equip the physically impaired with accessible tools and
waylearning

Once patients, family and friends enter the hospital, their wayfinding
needs are by no means over; challenges arise in terms of integration


and continuity throughout the visitor’s experience. Take for
example Hamilton Health Sciences, a series of buildings located
across different areas in Hamilton. Hamilton Health Science’s main
mission is to unify the wayfinding system, so whether a patient or
visitor is at the General or at the Henderson, the entire look and feel
of the wayfinding system is the same. Often in a hospital setting,
people are required to move around to get a variety of tasks
accomplished; the same patient may have to get an ultrasound and
blood work, for example. At HHS, these tests take place in two
different locations in two different buildings. A unified look is
therefore essential: colours, symbols, logos and nomenclature should
be continuous across different locations.

Conclusion


Spatial Branding is ever evolving. Leading the change is the
investment and commitment from stakeholders to incorporate
wayfinding into every new aspect of revitalization projects. Too
often we as a team are brought into a project after every aspect of
design is flushed out and presented as a whole; we are then left to
figure out a design, a wayfinding ‘look and feel.’ This is often a
mistake: wayfinding and place branding designs need to be
addressed during every phase, even during the ideation and
conceptual phases of a project. When the architect draws the first
line of a plan for a hospital, or the landscape designer chooses the
first pallet in a park environment, wayfinding designers should be
right there, helping to make these decisions. If wayfinding is
considered a secondary thought, the system will be difficult to
implement.

When planning project budgets, wayfinding should be considered an
important factor of the overall picture in terms of design. The key
elements in implementing a place branding initiative are the signs--
signs that say who you are, what you represent, and why visitors
should stop in. A place branding initiative should not skimp on
technology, materials, fabrication, method, or execution. When
investing in a space revitalization project, wayfinding and navigation
should be considered a serious design need. Without it, you will
never know if your there yet.

Reference Materials


Leach, Neil(ED.). Designing For A Digital World. West Sussex:
WILEY-ACADEMY, 2002.

Castle, Helen(ED.). 4dsocial interactive design environments.
London: International House, 2007.

Deasy, C.M, FAIA. Designing Places for People. New York: Whitney
Library of Design, 1990.


For more information, contact:

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, President
Shikatani Lacroix
387 Richmond Street East
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 1P6
Telephone: 416-367-1999
Email: jplacroix@sld.com

Place Branding

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