SIGNAGE/SCENOGRAPHY

Guidance systems are well known because they are everywhere. They have been with us at railway stations, airports, and in hospitals for a long time. Indications, signs, words, arrows, and symbols guide us as safely and clearly as possible through areas, buildings, and structures.
In addition, there is the discipline of signage/scenography. Beyond guiding and orientation, the building and its residents or users become perceivable. Corporate identity and exhibition content are conveyed atmospherically. People know where they are and perceive the circumstances, stories and the history. Leading automatically leads to perception. Communication that has a lasting effect.
We at the Säge have been working intensively on the subject of signage/scenography for 17 years. We guide and let people feel where and how they are, where they wait and where they are received, how they search and then find. It is the duty to orientate, the system that leads safely to the goal. And when people are waiting or searching, then this is the chance to communicate, the free exercise, to find out where the user is. Who lives in this building, who is staying there and what are they doing here – are they working or doing something else? What is the content to be conveyed?
For years we have been giving presentations on this issue to clients, architects, faculties, and specialist institutions. It is important to claim this new specialised planning as early as possible in projects. To be in favour of it and to know: there is the potential here from the management of visitors to communication, marketing, entertainment, information. Finding where you want to go and at the same time discovering who and/or what you are dealing with in the building. We want to direct and conduct people through the building with charm, using the very own symbols and means that traffic thinking has developed and uses.
In doing so, we always strive for cooperation. In initial hearings, which are not so costly for both sides, we aim to develop the chemistry and competence of both sides and approach the process and the necessities as well as solutions together. This is followed by a preliminary product that serves to coordinate and further develop the design. In close coordination with user flow analyses, initial ideas, and first approaches, we gradually come closer together in the workshop. In this way, a preliminary project can only lead to a solution.
For the province of Carinthia, a graphic design branch in context is very enriching. In order to have a unique selling point, we propose a master’s degree in signage. At the moment, there is such a programme in St. Pölten. However, the subject requires all disciplines of information design, communication design, graphic design and in your case optimally and alone – parallel to architecture. It is about spaces with writing, about graphics, colour and above all about content and substance.