Way-finding system for morningstar
Creating a way-finding system within the brand guidelines that is flexible and can be standardized across all global offices.
The Morningstar way-finding project is one I did under the guidance of my manager, Matthew Terdich, while I was working as an Associate Designer at their Chicago headquarters. There was a need for a way-finding system following the hiring boom over the pandemic especially with numerous employees visiting the physical office for the first time. The space was initially designed in 2007, but over the years had gone through multiple refreshes and did not include wayfinding in the latter years. Given the need and a prior attempt to solve the problem by Matthew in 2019, I was presented with my problem statement and the freedom to explore solutions within the Morningstar brand.
The first step of the project was to collect and document all the pre-existing signage and way finding material present in the office. All the floors had a laminated paper showcasing an architectural plan of the space with assigned team seating marked on it. The drawings were too cluttered to serve their purpose as visual guides. They were too detailed at their scale of 8.5 x 11 inches and didn’t include information like meeting room numbers or cardinal directions which made them useless to employees who were temporarily visiting the floor.
In order to improve the usability of the maps, I illustrated them in a style more cohesive to the Morningstar brand and included information on assigned team seating, meeting rooms, restrooms, stairways, cardinal directions and the location of additional amenities such as printers and phone booths. The color on the illustrations matched the paint on the walls of each floor and the type in Univers, Morningstar’s custom typeface. All floors in the building have three entry points so a custom illustration was created for each entryway.
As an immediate solution, the illustrations were printed on 36x24 white vinyl and pasted on the glass doors at the entryway on each floor. The vinyl on glass solution worked well for the facilities staff in terms of cleaning, but also wasn’t cause for concern when the paint in the building was refreshed.
Soon after installation, I noticed employees would glimpse at the maps while walking into the workspaces, but were still confused by the lack of arrows to clearly point to the direction a meeting room was located at. The illustrations were easy to access on an aesthetic level but had potential to be truly useful.
I spent some time rethinking the format of the signs and explored both vertical and horizontal options within the glass door frames of the entryways. This exploration helped introduce informational elements such as the meeting room directions as well as a list of office amenities and stylistic features such as color blocking which would go on to make the design more usable. The exercise also helped identify which entryways truly needed way-finding signage and which ones were used in more niche situations.
The horizontal format provided for a more flexible design which could accommodate for more information at eye level. Using this format, I explored a few variations of informational hierarchy with respect to the movement of employees in and out of the space. Through the process of iteration, I came to utilize color blocking as a functional tool that allowed for flexibility in the content as well as a visual distinction in the information hierarchy. My final design utilized the color blocking to create a modular system that could be adapted to its multiple use cases and was easy to understand.
The door on the left had the floor number toward the right to be the first element to be noticed, followed by the map. The door on the right has the directions towards the left and the office amenities on the right. Looking at the whole frame, the most important information is in the center, close to the door handle - the map and directions which can be gleamed in a quick survey of the sign, the floor number on the left - noticed first given the direction we read in, and the office amenities on the far right - for employees who have an extra second to spend reading the sign.
In creating this particular way-finding signage system, I was able to create a few standard type sizes for signs going forward, a design language utilizing the color blocking/banding, and a standard for what way-finding signs in our global offices could look like. The system is flexible and can accommodate more/less information by collapsing/expanding the columns and is integrated with the modern style associated with the Morningstar brand.