Garden Wayfinding

Mead Botanical Garden covers 47 acres, the largest garden in Winter Park, and visitors kept getting turned around in it. The brief was a wayfinding system that tells you where you are without turning a forest into an airport terminal.

What we found

We walked the trails, read the visitor surveys and watched where people stopped and looked around.

The layout changes. Paths move, features get added, so any sign had to be updatable without a new fabrication run.

The signs sit inside grounds people come for. They had to recede.

Directions had to work for a nine-year-old and for someone reading them from a wheelchair.

The system

Dark green panels, legible up close and nearly invisible from across a meadow. Multi-directional vandal-proof arrows set in cubed bounding boxes so the cardinal directions stay honest no matter how the post is set.

Modular panels, so a change to a path costs a panel instead of a sign.

A light touch on purpose. Enough to orient you, not so much that it kills the feeling of wandering.

A main pavilion map and prototype signs were built and walked through with the board before anything went into production.

Where it landed

Delivered on time and on budget. Visitors find their way, the garden updates panels itself, and the signage disappears into the trees the way it was supposed to.

Client: Mead Botanical Garden

Sector: Nonprofit

Disciplines: Environmental graphics, print, digital

Team: Jeffrey Blydenburgh, Catherine Bowman, Cynthia Hasenau, Brandon Saltmarsh, Sue Foreman, Mead board, Michael Luis Diaz