Details
Ostlund rehangs its collection every season, which meant refabricating signage every season. We moved the museum onto a fixed panel with a replaceable insert, so a rehang now costs paper instead of metal, and set the type for a visitor standing where people actually stand rather than where the drawing assumed.
Client
Ostlund Museum
year
2023
Constraint
Signs that are wrong most of the year
The signs were correct for about six weeks a year. The rest of the time they were quietly wrong.
Refabrication was slow enough that the museum had started taping over panels, which is its own kind of answer.
Ostlund rehang four times a year. The permanent collection moves, loans arrive and leave, and a gallery that was Nordic Textiles in March is Paper and Press by June — but the signage had been fabricated as though none of that ever happened.
Each rehang meant a three-week wait and an invoice, so the museum stopped ordering and started improvising. Vinyl over aluminium, printed A4 in a frame, and eventually tape.
The brief that arrived asked for better-looking signs. The actual problem was that the signs could not be changed by the people who needed to change them.
My Process
Floor Study
Followed visitors for two days to find where people actually stop. It was rarely where the signs were.
Panel Test
Mocked three panel heights in the gallery and left them up for a week before choosing.
Type Sizing
Set the labels at reading distance rather than on screen. Everything got about two points larger.
Install
Fitted the fixed panels once, then handed the insert template to the front-of-house team.
Rollout
One profile, changed in-house
A single panel profile in two heights, with a slotted insert the front-of-house team changes themselves.
Seasonal rehang down from three weeks to two days
One panel, two heights, no bespoke pieces
Type sized from a standing position, not a drawing
The insert prints on the museum’s own machine, on a stock we specified and they keep in the cupboard. Changing a gallery name is now a five-minute job for whoever is on shift.
Type was sized on site rather than on screen. We printed candidates, taped them at height and read them from where a visitor actually stands, which moved the body size up two steps from what the drawing had suggested.
Twelve panels went in over a weekend. The museum has since ordered six more in the same profile without involving us, which is the measure that matters.
