Cities Across the Country Turn to Design Experts to Provide Better Wayfinding for Residents and Visitors
Los Angeles, Milwaukee among dozens of cities hiring design firms to develop better navigational cues to local districts and destinations
Corbin News Release
October 18, 2000
Traverse City, MI — Cities around the country are increasingly turning to design experts to create more visitor-friendly wayfinding systems that better direct drivers and pedestrians to top destinations, and better promote their top attractions.
One leading firm in the field of environmental graphic design — Corbin Design of Traverse City, Michigan — has signed contracts with four major U.S. cities in recent months. Los Angeles, California has just joined Kansas City, Missouri; Tucson, Arizona; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin as Corbin's newest clients. The Traverse City firm is also wrapping up wayfinding programs for Vail, Colorado and both Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan. A recently completed signage and wayfinding system for downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, meanwhile, won the Society for Environmental Graphic Design's coveted 2000 Merit Award.
"It is in our cities that we celebrate the diversity of this nation," said Jeffry Corbin, president of Corbin Design. "Our downtowns bring together people of all walks of life, ethnicity and interests. Effective wayfinding is one way to increase visitors' sense of security. Knowing where you want to go and how to get there builds confidence and increases one's willingness to explore the many opportunities that our nation's downtowns have to offer."
The Los Angeles project, known as Downtown LA Walks, involves developing a pedestrian and vehicular wayfinding system for the city's bustling downtown core — an area that encompasses 350 city blocks, 50 streets, over 300 intersections, 30 freeway off ramps and eight subway stops. Corbin Design is partnering with Hunt Design Associates of Pasadena on the extensive project, which is coordinated by a group of nine business improvement districts called the Confederation of Downtown Associations. Project funding comes from the Metropolitan Transit Authority, City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation, Community Redevelopment Agency and the nine business improvement districts.
Kansas City's project involves improving wayfinding throughout the city's Central Business District, to provide better access to downtown businesses and entertainment venues. The system will incorporate direction giving to the city's historic 18th & Vine District, where legendary jazz musicians from Count Basie to Charlie "Bird" Parker got their start. Three Interstate highway systems and two expressways now converge around the district, generating heavy traffic and making it difficult for drivers to get on and off the highway at the right location. A lack of informational signage adds to the challenge of figuring out how to get to specific locations or parking areas. Working with local architects Gould Evans Goodman Associates and transportation engineers at TranSystems Corp., Corbin Design is designing a new system to provide comprehensive directional signage that promotes downtown attractions and enhances the streetscape.
Visitors to Tucson have long grappled with the difficulty of getting around the downtown business and art district. City officials recognized the problem in their request for wayfinding proposals with this observation — "It is a common experience for those who work in the downtown area to be walking on a sidewalk and have a bewildered motorist shout from a car window, ‘Where can I find parking around here?'" While past strategic plans have outlined the need for a comprehensive signage program and explored the types of signs needed, Corbin Design's role is to build on the past design and concept work, assemble the parts into a comprehensive whole and oversee its installation.
In Milwaukee, Corbin Design is working with the global architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on a downtown revitalization project designed to breathe new life into the city's declining Wisconsin Avenue retail district. The streetscape project, to be funded by a $5 million federal grant, involves extensive landscaping, streetlight improvements and public art displays along two miles of streets off Milwaukee's lakefront. Corbin Design's role in the larger project involves developing a more intuitive and coherent signage system for the project area.
Jeffry Corbin's vision of a changing urban landscape led him to found Corbin Design, an environmental graphic design firm based in Traverse City, Michigan, in 1976. Since then, the firm has completed hundreds of projects for governmental, medical, educational 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 — all of them based on the philosophy of "helping people access places and information." A partial list of Corbin Design's civic wayfinding programs includes Downtown Indianapolis; Madison, Wisconsin; Columbus, Indiana; Vail, Colorado; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Other wayfinding clients include Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Clarian Health in Indianapolis, Penn State University, and Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI). Additional information about the firm can be found online at www.corbindesign.com.