Environmental & Signage Design · Corlette Design, Shanghai · 2021–2022
A sign is an interruption. In a compound designed to feel calm and expensive, that is a problem.
For a residential development in Shanghai I designed the wayfinding system: where every sign stands, what each one says, and what the whole family looks like. The placement came from analysing how people and vehicles actually move through the site — and specifically from where a stranger stops and hesitates. The form came from the architecture itself: the building's repeated three-pillar motif and the circular geometry of the project's own logo.
The work sat between three teams — client, architects, landscape designers — and almost every decision had to survive all three.
This is your spatial and systems project. It shows you can work at 1:500 on a site plan and at the scale of a single sign face, and that you can hold a design position inside someone else's engineering constraints. Don't present it as “I drew some nice golden signs” — present it as an information system placed in a landscape.
The project was a high-end residential compound: multiple towers, landscaped grounds, an underground car park, and a mix of people moving through it every day for entirely different reasons.
Residents know the place. They walk the same route from gate to lift lobby daily and stop reading signs after the first week. Everyone else — visitors, delivery drivers, maintenance workers, first-time buyers — arrives with no mental model at all, often in a vehicle, often in a hurry, often at night.
A residential compound is also not a shopping mall. The client's brief was for the environment to read as calm and luxurious, and every sign added to it is a small subtraction from that. So the quantity of signage was not a neutral decision: too few and a stranger is lost at the gate, too many and the landscape starts to look like a car park.
My role: concept development for the wayfinding system — flow analysis, signage allocation strategy, design direction and the sign family design — working with the studio and coordinating with the client's architects and landscape designers.
Where does information need to exist in a landscape — and how little of it can you get away with?
Two tensions ran through the whole project:
Every sign helps someone and costs the landscape something. The system had to be designed to the minimum that still worked, which meant knowing precisely where people become uncertain rather than distributing signs evenly across the site.
The client's language for what they wanted was subjective — golden, luxurious, superior. Wayfinding decisions are not: legibility, mounting height, sightlines, night visibility. The design direction had to be agreed in a way that let the client exercise real preference without the system losing its function.
I did not start from sign design. I started from movement.
The people who need wayfinding most are not the residents. They are the visitors, delivery drivers and maintenance workers arriving for the first time — and their uncertainty is concentrated at a small number of decision points, not spread evenly across the site. Signs were placed at each of those points and along the key routes, rather than distributed by area.
Once placement was settled, the question became appearance — and the client's brief was a feeling, not a specification.
Rather than presenting finished proposals and asking for a verdict, I built a two-axis reference map of existing objects and let the client and I locate the project together:
Overall style, and by extension the materials and textures that come with it.
The physical character of the form.
We marked two zones on it: one for the material reference, one for the visual appearance. That gave the client a genuine choice with a boundary around it, and gave me a direction I could design against without re-litigating taste at every review.
“Luxury” is unusable as a brief — it means something different to everyone in the room. Turning it into two axes made the client's preference locatable, and made the eventual decision a shared one rather than an approval.
The client wanted the signage to belong to the building: golden, and carrying the number three. The reference was both cultural and architectural — three is the number from which everything follows in Laozi's Tao Te Ching, and the building's own entrance repeats it in three pillars on each side. That gave me a motif with a reason behind it rather than a decorative rule.
Each decision paired with its reasoning — show the artefact next to the argument.
The allocation strategy came from analysed flows and from where unfamiliar users hesitate. This keeps the sign count low, which protects the landscape the client was paying an architect and a landscape designer to create.
Vehicle signs carry approach and parking information at speed; pedestrian signs carry destination and address at walking pace; building entrance number signs work at the last few metres. The same family, three reading distances.
Three circles on the front of the signage, three lines down the side. It ties the system to the architecture's three-pillar motif and to the client's cultural brief in one move — and because it repeats across every sign type, it is what makes the family read as one system.
The round sign faces are not a style choice; they are the brand mark's geometry rendered at architectural scale, so the signs identify the development before anyone reads a word on them.
Signs that light at night need power routed to them, which means their positions are fixed long before construction finishes. I coordinated placement with the landscape designers and architects so that lighting, planting and foundations were resolved together — a sign is only as well-placed as the site plan lets it be.
The system: an entrance sign carrying the development's identity; vehicle signs for the car park approach and retail access; pedestrian signs for destinations within the grounds; and building entrance number signs at the doors. One material and colour language, one geometric motif, three reading distances.
What holds it together: every sign is in a position derived from an analysed flow, and every sign carries the same two architectural cues — the circle from the logo, the three from the building and the brief. Placement came from behaviour; form came from the architecture. Neither came from the sign itself.
My contribution, stated plainly: I turned a landscape plan and a subjective brief into an information system — deciding where the compound needed to speak, how little it needed to say, and what it should look like when it did.
That wayfinding is not sign design — it is the design of a plan, and the signs are just where that plan becomes visible. And that a subjective brief is not an obstacle: given the right instrument, a client's taste becomes something you can navigate together instead of guess at.
Working alongside architecture and landscape teams taught me to think about a design as a component of a system rather than an object — that a sign has to answer to a site plan, a lighting circuit and a planting scheme before it answers to a layout grid. It was the hardest and most useful collaboration of my early career.
This is the same problem I kept returning to afterwards: how to give someone exactly the information they need, at the moment they need it, without demanding attention they do not have. In a residential compound that meant a sign at a decision point. At Yordando it meant one button in a cook's hand. The environment changes; the question does not.
Reference blocks and production notes. Turn the appendix off before publishing.
A wayfinding system for a luxury residential compound in Shanghai. Sign placement derived from analysed pedestrian and vehicle flows; sign form derived from the architecture's own logic. Designed inside the architects' and landscape team's constraints rather than applied over them.
Placing information where people actually stop to decide — and shaping it so it belongs to the building.
Wayfinding & Signage Designer (concept development) · 2021–2022 · Corlette Design, Shanghai
Site flow analysis & signage allocation strategy · Resident and stakeholder interviews · Design direction and reference mapping · Sign family design (entrance, vehicle, pedestrian, building number) · Coordination with architecture and landscape teams