Wayfinding is a type of signage providing information to users who are in need of help in navigating their way around a particular site. The use of words, symbols, diagrams, images and design is essential in creating an effective wayfinding system.  The wayfinding signage is a reflection of the specific company or site and therefore is another incentive to implement the wayfinding successfully.

Modern wayfinding design is getting bigger and better by the minute. Tiny signs are no longer, they have been replaced by large letters, numbers and arrows placed on ceilings, floors or even across both. As the monumental increase in technology has occurred and changed so many things in our world today, why wouldn’t it also affect the way we design our wayfinding signage? A common trend now is the use of electronic kiosks and flat panel screens to display information for the user. These forms of digital signage are interactive allowing the user to find exactly what they are looking for.

Pylon signs: the future of guerilla advertising?

Originaly, the term guerilla marketing (also called guerilla advertising) refers to small companies with a small advertising budget that use unconventional and creative marketing tactics. But this concept has recently been adopted by big multinational companies that have large budgets and well established brands.

These large companies such as Coca Cola, Ikea, Mars, or Apple, place innovative pylon signs in strategic locations. Classic Pylon signs can be seen from very far away and are usually a great way of grabbing potential customer’s attention but they can turn into the ultimate advertising tool when used in a creative and surprising way. These new generation pylon signs usually incorporate the structure of the sign in the design of the entire add or use materials that allow to give a third dimension to add. Other alternative pylon signs were designed to display different graphics according to the weather or time of the day. Some other ones were linked to a computer screen were people could write their own message to customize the existing add.

This new signage trend focuses all the attention on the product and are extremely eye-catchy: Pylon signs have always been used to advertise all sorts of products but guerilla marketing brought a new perpective to their usage. With the rise of online advertising, street signs lost some popularity but with the new guerilla marketing practices, they might become the number one branding tool for big companies.

Below are some great examples of original pylon signs by companies allocating a large budget to advertising:

Recently i was forced to move home at short notice. my landlord who i had been paying rent to to live in their apartment for the last 3 years decided to drop a nasty surprise on me. what happened is i received a call late one night informing me that i had 4 weeks to be out as the property was being sold. it came out of the blue as i had seen the landlord two months ago (about moving boxes to storage) and they never mentioned anything about moving.

so eventually i organised the removals company and also grabbed some boxes for the move and packed everything up. little did i know how long the whole process would take nor how many things i still owned and had not thrown away years ago. i decided to have a garage sale to get rid of a lot of the old items and ended up making enough money from the garage sale to pay for the whole moving process – removalist company for 6 hours, the boxes, and packing materials i used. so it is definately a great idea to give stuff away or hold a garage sale before moving – no point moving stuff you don’t use!