Finding your way around a library that moved its walls

The East Fork branch closed for eleven months while the city rebuilt its interior. When it reopened, the front door was on a different street, the children’s room had moved upstairs and the reference desk had become a row of laptops. The old signs, where they survived, pointed to rooms that no longer existed.

The branch manager had a budget for signs and no time to write a brief, so we wrote it with her during a week at the help desk.

A week at the help desk

Marta sat beside the desk for five days and logged every question a visitor asked. There were 312. Seventy of them were “where are the restrooms”, forty-one were about the children’s room and twenty-eight were about printing. Only nine questions were about finding a book.

That list set the priorities. The first signs a visitor sees now answer those three questions before anything else.

Four zones, four colours

We grouped the building into four zones: Children, Adults, Study and Community. Each has one colour, used on the floor map, the shelf ends and the room signs, and nowhere else. Green was ruled out early, because the building’s exit signs are green and need to stay the only green on the walls.

Every sign is in English and Spanish, at the same size. Earlier signs had put the Spanish in a smaller italic underneath; the branch staff asked us to stop doing that.

Paper first

Two weeks before the reopening, we printed every sign type on paper at full size and taped them up. Staff wrote corrections on them in marker. Twenty-three signs moved, six were cut and four new ones were added, all before anything went to the fabricator.

Shelf ends you can change

Collections move. The 60 shelf-end panels hold printed inserts behind a clear face, so the library staff can print and swap a new label from a template we set up in their usual office software.