Which way shall I go?

Submitted by KA9021 on
designers

Very soon the Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Karelia will open its doors for its first guests after renovation. What will they see inside the museum? A new visual navigation system, which is being developed within the framework of the KA9021 project "Museums in Focus: the Development of Cultural Services for Chinese Tourists".

The main aim of the navigation is not to paste over all the museum halls and walls with pointers, but to show the visitor a MORE CONVENIENT way to get to the place he needs and to tell about the services that are available today.

The main part of the navigation in the Museum of Fine Arts will be concentrated on the first floor, since the entrance area is the best place to inform visitors about services and activities. Each guest should easily understand where the ticket office or toilet is, where to buy souvenirs or attend an art work-shop. The new navigation  system will also help the visitor to understand where to go to see the permanent museum expositions and the temporary expositins. If one chooses to visit the temporary exhibition on the first floor, the navigation will inform the guest about the permanent exhibition on the second floor, where canvases by Aivazovsky, Shishkin and other great artists are exhibited.

It is typical for the entrance area in many museums to be overloaded  with information. To solve this problem it was decided to involve not only a graphic designer, but also an interior designer in the development of the navigation systems, who could look at the museum space from the outside, set priorities between the navigation signs, based on international and Russian experience. The specialists decided to move some information to another zone or redesign the format of the information presentation in order to reduce and optimize the information load on the visitor. The designers offered a professional solution using the corporate identity of the Museum.