Over the last few months we’ve been busily working on an exciting new project for the BBC. Working with BBC Workplace 383 Project were selected to address the wayfinding and interior branding of the iconic White City building in London. Our brief forms part of a major ongoing refurbishment taking place within the complex over the coming months and sought to address both the practical navigation points of the building as well as creating an interior scheme which was visually engaging for staff and visitors. The team at White City summed the challenge up better than I can:

Space vs Place; What defines a place – is it the furniture, the people who occupy it, or the existence of a ‘function’ for the space that makes it ‘a place’. If ‘place’ is defined by the existence of a function, a recogniseable area or distinct character, then White City has a lot of space – and not much place. 383 were asked to create places within the many square footage of office spaces that the BBC had available.

The challenge was to create a sense of place – an area to refer to, meet at, or pause to contemplate between meetings without having to construct new physical spaces or alter layouts. The brief required a intuitive response that referenced the purpose of the building and encouraged a sense of corporate pride.

What did we do?

What we delivered had three main elements. Firstly, we addressed the main wayfinding issue by rezoning the building in to more clearly defined coloured areas and overhauling all the internal signage and lift graphics. To ensure better traffic through the maze of corridors we utilised a consistent coloured line which runs throughout the entire building and changes colour dependent on your location. This not only helps control foot traffic, but became a useful graphic device for the second part of the solution.

For the second part of the scheme we created over fifty wall illustrations from a bank of iconic BBC shows and quotes. These graphics will be used large format throughout the building and interact at various points with the corridor line – breaking and splitting to morph in with the illustrations. The illustrations not only provide interest to visitors navigating the building but help to zone specific areas of the space and give departments ownership over their own areas. A couple of our favourites are shown below.

The final challenge was to figure out how the large quote style could be used in the main entrance and reception area. The reception area has walls on either side several floors high and is the main entrance point for all staff and visitors. As such it was important to come up with something that would still hold interest day in day out and set the tone for the rest of the scheme. We adapted the static graphic style we’d come up with for the rest of the building and built a more timely version which pulls snippets of live information from various BBC sites, formats them in to the quote style and projects them across the walls. Using a series of custom flash animations driven by various RSS feeds we were able to create a constantly evolving and pre-moderated stream of information which slowly animates throughout the day.

You can view a few more images from the project in our portfolio.

Just noticed that the new BBC homepage I clocked a while back has gone live today. Nice to see for once that design by committee hasn’t resulted in every quirky feature being stripped out and normalised! Thumbs up that the retro analog clock held out as well!