When Architecture Meets Graphic Design

Environmental Graphic Design is a type of design all its own. It can include landscape design, industrial design, and your traditional graphic design. The end goal is to use these different disciplines to develop a complete sense of place: an environment.

In today’s fast-paced world, environments have become more complex and even subdivided into specialized parts. Once cities were only a few miles apart, but today, they can sprawl for miles in subdivisions and specialized districts and sections. This is where the need for environmental graphic design takes its roots. In a world where grocery stores have developed into supermarkets, hospitals into athe larger healthcare centers, and stadiums into sports complexes, wayfinding signs play a crucial role in tying together an ever-increasing number of specialized parts in a coherent way.

Examples of wayfinding graphics

 

 

This increase in complexity and specialization has most impacted transportation terminals. Your basic services like ticketing and arrivals have transformed into the new transportation facility of an airport or railway terminal that is the gateway to hundreds of destinations. Environmental Graphics serve as the tie that binds all of these elements together.  

Examples of transportation graphics

Before the turn of the twentieth century, the identities of institutions such as churches, schools, and government buildings, were meant to last a lifetime. Today however, identities are fleeting. The department store meant to anchor a city may change its identity three or four times within 10 years. A bank or stadium could change names every couple of years. These modern institutions that once could not be separated from their identity, now serve merely as frames for a constantly changing set of organizations. New terminologies that have evolved such as “branding of places” and “functional obsolescence” have grown to explain and adapt to the trend through temporary elements. Many companies today have detached themselves from any real sense of a place or stationary environment. For example, a McDonalds used to be known primarily through its distinctive architectural form. Now, a Starbucks can be located in a historic warehouse, gas station, mall kiosk, or supermarket.

In the end, it is the role of environmental graphics and branding that have supplanted architecture as the key means to identity.