The Marchbank Museum holds a significant natural history collection in a Victorian building never designed for modern footfall, and visitors were reliably getting lost between the east and west wings. The brief combined two jobs at once: a wayfinding system, and an exhibition design language flexible enough for temporary shows.

We mapped every visitor route over two weeks of observation before drawing anything, then built a numbering and colour system keyed to geological strata rather than arbitrary gallery names, so the wayfinding itself teaches part of the collection. Signage uses cut vermillion on cast panels that read from a distance.

A wayfinding system has done its job when nobody remembers using it, only that they found the room.

The temporary exhibition language had to coexist with a building full of protected fixtures, so every graphic element is freestanding or magnetic rather than fixed to the historic fabric. We designed a modular panel kit the museum’s own team now installs and strikes without calling the studio for each new show.

Average dwell time in the redesigned galleries rose by over half within the first season, and complaints about navigation to the front desk dropped close to zero. The museum’s learning team now uses the wayfinding numbering in school workbooks, which nobody on either side had planned for at the outset.