Penn State points visitors in the right direction
Big Ten university installs new $1 million wayfinding program to help newcomers navigate expanded University Park campus
Corbin News Release
August 17, 2000
University Park, PA — The Pennsylvania State University, one of the nation's ten largest universities, has completed installation of a comprehensive new wayfinding and signage system to help its 42,000 students and its visitors navigate the main University Park campus. The $1 million signage system was developed by Corbin Design of Traverse City, Michigan, a national leader in environmental graphic design. Poblocki & Sons of Milwaukee, Wisconsin built the 590 new and replacement signs.
"Corbin Design was selected to lead the project because of the firm's professionalism and past experience," said Jim Lettiere, Penn State's manager of space planning and management. Corbin Design has developed exterior and interior wayfinding systems for more than a dozen colleges and universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia and IUPUI (Indiana University and Purdue University at Indianapolis).
Penn State officials commissioned the program two years ago to address the growing challenge of navigating the University's 540-acre University Park campus, Lettiere said. A $700-million campus-wide construction program over the past five years has added to the challenge by creating new buildings and expanding the campus borders. Emails to University President Graham Spanier from new students and students with disabilities expressing their difficulty in finding accessible pathways, building names, and accessible building entrances convinced University officials that professional help was needed.
Lettiere noted that before the project began, wayfinding was a problem for the first-time campus visitor. "Many campus streets and buildings were not visually identified," he said. "Signs were often a forgotten part of new construction and renovation projects. Now we have established an annual budget to maintain and perpetuate the new signage system."
The wayfinding project began with formation of an interdepartmental committee to determine top campus destinations. Once those were identified, Corbin Design analyzed the campus and determined the best routes to use to guide visitors to those locations, then designed the various sign types. The system begins with new directional signs that guide visitors to the University from area highways. Other elements include new street signs bearing the University mark to reinforce the Penn State image, boundary markers indicating the campus borders, monument-style directional signage to the top destinations, building name signs for the 450 educational and administration buildings on campus, and new regulatory parking signs across campus.
Pedestrian maps based on the university's own campus map illustrate more than twenty specific university "neighborhoods" as well as the campus as a whole, delineate well-lighted pathways, accessible routes and building entrances, and point out the location of emergency phones. The entire system is designed to better define the growing campus, help visitors locate new and existing facilities, and improve campus safety.
"As far as we know, it's the first Big Ten campus to implement a truly comprehensive and coordinated vehicular and pedestrian wayfinding system," said Jeffry Corbin, principal of Corbin Design. "The mandate from President Spanier was that he wanted visitors to the campus to be able to easily find their way to the many facilities and programs that the University offers."
"The objective was to make sense out of the campus," said Robert Brengman, lead designer for the project.
Originally planned for a phased installation over three years, the wayfinding program was so favorably received that University officials decided to install most of the system in a single year. All but some larger campus boundary markers, highway signage and electronic message boards are being set up now. About 80 percent of the signs were installed in time for the National Governors' Association annual July meeting, which was held in on the University Park campus and in neighboring State College.
"So far we've had a tremendous favorable response from the campus community, including students, faculty and staff," Lettiere said. "The response has been so overwhelming that they're actually asking for more signs."
Visuals are available upon request.
Jeffry Corbin's vision of a changing urban landscape led him to found Corbin Design, a signage/environmental graphics firm based in Traverse City, Michigan, in 1976. Since then, the firm has completed hundreds of highly successful signage projects for educational, medical, governmental and business clients across the country. Corbin Design's expanding scope of projects includes signage and wayfinding, interactive systems, Web sites, identity systems and print communications. A partial list of clients includes Oakland University and Wayne State University in Michigan, Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Clarian Health in Indianapolis, Steelcase and Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI). Corbin's civic wayfinding programs include Downtown Indianapolis; Dayton/Montgomery County, Ohio; Madison, Wisconsin; Columbus, Indiana; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The firm was recently awarded projects to design wayfinding programs for Downtown Kansas City, Missouri and Tucson, Arizona.
Additional information about the firm can be found at www.corbindesign.com.