A museum about light should be easy to find your way through in the dark. We designed a wayfinding and exhibition system where light is not decoration but information.
The brief
The museum occupies a former tram depot: one vast hall, six mezzanines and almost no natural light in the galleries. Visitors arrive in large school groups and in quiet ones and twos, often within the same hour.
The museum needed signage that worked for both, a graphic identity for twelve permanent galleries, and a system the in-house team could extend for temporary shows.
Approach
Each gallery is assigned a color temperature rather than a color — from 1,800 K candlelight to 10,000 K northern sky. Signs glow at that temperature, and the same values appear in print and on screen, so a visitor can follow the light without reading a word.
Craft
All signage is edge-lit glass with a single family of pictograms drawn on a 24-unit grid. Typography is set large and low, at a child’s eye height, with tactile lettering and braille at every decision point.
Visitors stopped asking where to go. The building now explains itself — and it is beautiful while it does.
Pieter de Vries, Head of Visitor Experience
Outcome
The museum opened to 180,000 visitors in its first six months. Its own team has since used the system for three temporary exhibitions, adding galleries without calling us once — which is exactly the point.
- 180,000 visitors in the first six months
- Wayfinding questions at the front desk down by 60%
- Shortlisted for two international design awards