Brain Park in Kraków is a new office development by Echo Investment. The complex consists of three ten-storey buildings with an underground car park, as well as a courtyard where places to relax, eat outdoors, play table tennis or play chess have been planned.
The wayfinding design we prepared for this facility is minimalist and elegant – the whole has a unified, welcoming character that does not compete with the architectural and interior design. An important aspect guiding the idea of this wayfinding was the use of materials and the application of colours that appear in the spaces of the office building both in the architectural and finishing layers.
Each of the Brain Park buildings in Kraków has been assigned a main colour, which is also reflected in the design of the information carriers. However, in order to make the signage system unique and interesting, the main colour was complemented by dark blue and natural wood. The dark blue also appears in the outdoor area, being the leading colour for pylons and information boards. This colour code makes it easier for users to move around the project area. Once they are familiar with it, and at the same time gives each building a slightly different character. Wayfinding also use the wood elements, they are present in the interior design as a distinctive feature of the representative spaces. The visual language has been complemented by geometrical, hand-painted elements using a single-colour, gradually fading gradient. This has an aesthetic function and allowed the creation of a large-scale graphics in spaces such as the underground car park.
The typeface Di Grotesk, from the Polish typographic studio Threedotstype, was chosen for the primary use within the wayfinding system. In the design, the Bold style was used for Polish texts and Regular for English texts. For more expressive applications, primarily building names, staircases and floor numbers, a unique character set was created based on the Eklips Semibold typeface (Letters from Sweden). The typographic messages were also complemented by the set of unique pictograms – closely related to the Di Grotesk typeface, and designed on the basis of its characteristic elements.
