The studio
Wayfinders is a specialist wayfinding studio: architects, qualified graphic designers, project managers experienced in construction, and our own installation teams. We have been doing this for nearly 50 years.
Who we are
Wayfinders is the only dedicated wayfinding company in the UK and Ireland. For nearly 50 years we have done one thing: plan, design, certify and install the wayfinding systems that get people through large, complex buildings. Our own architects, graphic designers, project managers and installation teams work from offices in Dublin, Belfast and London.
Most projects still buy wayfinding as a line item called signage. One company draws it, another makes it, a third hangs it, and nobody owns the outcome. The programme pays for the gaps: drawings that arrive late, approvals that bounce for months, errors found on site and snags at handover.
We took the other route. Because we do nothing else, we've turned wayfinding into a repeatable, technology-enabled system that scales from a single apartment block to a national estate, and from Irish hospitals and campuses to residential and data-centre programmes across Europe.
01What we believe
Four convictions shape every project we take on, from the first look at your floorplans to the last certificate.
A sign on its own tells you very little. What gets someone from the car park to the right ward, or from the lift lobby to apartment 4.12, is a system: a naming and numbering logic, a hierarchy of information and a sign family that applies it the same way on every floor. We design that first. The signs follow from it.
Wayfinding is all we do. We've stayed narrow on purpose, because depth is what lets us make the work repeatable: the same method, the same standards and the same platform on a single block or a whole portfolio.
Accessibility, fire and language requirements are designed in from the first drawing, not checked at the end. We sign off the certificates ourselves, so the evidence a main contractor needs at handover comes from the same people who did the work.
Design, project management and installation are done by our own teams. There's no gap between the studio that drew it and the crew that fits it, and nobody to point at when something needs fixing.
02The team
Wayfinding sits between architecture, graphic design and construction. We employ all three, plus the people who fit the signs.
They read your drawings the way your architect wrote them: circulation, cores, fire compartments and the decision points in between. They set out where every sign goes and why.
Qualified designers who build the sign family, the typography, pictograms and colour, and who write brand guidelines as well as follow them. Designers talking to designers is a large part of why our approvals move in days.
People who have worked on site and know a construction programme from the inside. They run the package against your dates, sit in your progress meetings and keep the wayfinding off the critical path.
Our fitters understand complex construction schedules, live buildings and permit systems. Correct heights, correct locations, a clean finish, and no subcontracted crew learning the building on the day.
03Working with contractors
On large projects we're usually appointed by the main contractor. These are the reasons they give for choosing us, in the order they give them.
Approvals cut from months to days. The whole team reviews one live sign schedule and approves sign by sign, and our packages average 1.8 design rounds to approval.
Typically around 20% off the wayfinding package, because a repeatable system and our own platform take the waste out of design, approvals and site time.
One appointment covers design, compliance, manufacture, installation and certification. You chase one party, and one party signs the certificate.
Signage that sits with the architecture and the client's identity, which matters to the architect, the developer and the people who end up using the building.
Contractors and developers we work with
04Sectors
The same end-to-end system, tuned to the pressures of each sector.
05The platform
Our own platform runs the sign schedule from first design to signed certificate.
Every sign is a record. The client, the architect, the project manager and our designers review the same schedule, comment on the sign itself and approve it sign by sign. That is how approvals come down from months to days.
The package exports to BIM and surfaces in the construction management system your site team already runs. At handover the building gets the as-built schedule and certification records generated from the same data.
06Offices
Our head office is in Dublin, with bases outside Belfast and in London serving projects across Northern Ireland and Britain.
Our head office, serving projects across Ireland.
Wayfinder House
Baldoyle Industrial Estate, Dublin 13
D13 H6E5
Our base just outside Belfast, serving projects across Northern Ireland.
20 Bridge Road
Moira, Co. Down
BT67 0PF
Our London office, serving projects across Britain.
23 Clerkenwell Green
Clerkenwell, London
EC1R 0NA
07Further
Start a project
We'll come back with the schedule, the programme and a price, and from then on the wayfinding is one less package to chase.
