5 Ways Environmental Graphics Create a Memorable Experience
The G2 Learning Hub recently wrote a great article about environmental graphic design and how it impacts a user’s (or guest’s) experience.
While signage and wayfinding can certainly engage people with their everyday surroundings by making the space more informative and easier to navigate, environmental graphics can make the space more memorable for its visitors. Or think about the cultural and social phenomenon of exterior wall murals as a means for businesses to increase their brand awareness and engagement – all with a beautiful statement piece begging to be shared on the ‘Gram.
Here, we explore five types of environmental graphic designs to consider that can make a visitor’s experience more productive, exciting and yes, even memorable.
5 Types of Environmental Graphics & How They Shape Experiences
Wayfinding Systems
Wayfinding is essential to any environment and its branding and is so much more than directional signage. Whenever someone enters an environment, they have to make immediate – and unfamiliar – decisions. So visual cues, such as maps, directions, and symbols, help guide people safely and securely, especially in hospitals, offices, parking garages, and more.
The goal: Helping users find their way.
Exhibition
Much like caveman drawings, exhibition design is nothing new. These designs tell stories through visuals as an integrative, multidisciplinary process that creates multi-layered narratives around a theme or topic.
Whether you’re at a museum, visitor center, park, trade show, exposition or retail stores, exhibition design is the intersection of physical space and visual storytelling. An application for corporate offices can be timelines or donor walls.
The goal: Telling a story through a variety of visuals.
Interactive Experiences
This variety of environmental design focuses primarily on engagement – educating, prompting, inspiring – with touchpoints to connect users, often literally, with more physical and digital mediums than other types of environmental design.
The goal: Engaging users with their physical environment.
Public Installation
Using a vast array of materials and media, public installations can be art, memorials, gateways, landmarks, signage, super-scaled graphics, contextual elements, place-markers, and even branded corporate elements, lending their environments meaning, context and, often, an iconic optic.
They can be physical manifestations of the distinctiveness of a particular location, such as the Cloud Gate sculpture, also known as ‘the Bean,’ in Chicago.
The goal: Expressing individuality and branding through visuals.
Placemaking & Identity
While identity says, ‘You are here,’ placemaking creates the experience. Once a visitor knows where they are – ‘here’ – graphic elements such as type, color, pattern, video, and motion serve to shape the experience and identity of that place for every individual.
The goal: Creating an experience once users realize they are ‘here.’
We are always looking for innovative ways to help our clients, from extending our illuminated signs to full lighting solutions to extending our custom designs to architectural elements. With the thoughtful, branded navigation solutions of environmental graphic designs, businesses can give visitors confidence while telling the story of the community and environment.
To learn more about how environmental graphic design and signage can improve your physical spaces, contact us at Creative Sign Designs today!
