UI SFCH Exterior Building Lettering Full

Inno­v­a­tive Sig­nage for an Inno­v­a­tive Hos­pi­tal: Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Stead Fam­i­ly Chil­dren’s Hospital

Nation­al­ly rec­og­nized health­care facil­i­ty builds new chil­dren’s hos­pi­tal over­look­ing Kin­nick Sta­di­um. See how sig­nage blends archi­tec­tural­ly, cre­ate fun donor recog­ni­tion, and helps with Wayfind­ing through­out the campus.

First Things First

Our team col­lab­o­rat­ed with Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Health Care, Heery Inter­na­tion­al archi­tec­tur­al team, and Gilbane, the gen­er­al con­trac­tor, ear­ly in the plan­ning process. The sig­nage scope includ­ed an entire­ly new facil­i­ty dur­ing a re-brand. Ser­vices includ­ed plan­ning, design, man­u­fac­ture, and instal­la­tion of all sig­nage for Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Stead Fam­i­ly Children’s Hos­pi­tal, and updat­ing exist­ing sig­nage with rebrand­ed designs. The sig­nage cre­at­ed includes exte­ri­or brand­ing and wayfind­ing, inte­ri­or wayfind­ing signs, inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or donor signage.

Inte­ri­or Updates

UIHC SFCH Interior Overhead Blog

With­in UI Stead Fam­i­ly Children’s Hos­pi­tal, cus­tom Infin­i­ty Pho­topoly­mer signs with tac­tile graph­ics have mod­u­lar com­po­nents that are easy and afford­able to update in addi­tion to being ADA Com­pli­ant. They also are part of the hospital’s wayfind­ing sys­tem that includes floor-by-floor col­or cod­ing and iconog­ra­phy. Dur­ing con­struc­tion, UI Stead Fam­i­ly Children’s Hos­pi­tal went through a rebrand­ing that required new graph­ics to be incor­po­rat­ed into the inte­ri­or and wayfind­ing signage.

Donor Recog­ni­tion

Anoth­er major com­po­nent of the project was to incor­po­rate donor recog­ni­tion dis­plays with sev­er­al donor walls placed through­out the hos­pi­tal in ele­va­tor lob­bies. These donor walls have a dis­tinc­tive design with a series of glass pan­els that mim­ics the look of the quilt pat­tern used in brand­ed mate­ri­als through­out the hos­pi­tal. To help con­trol costs, the Lat­i­tude Sig­nage team engi­neered a solu­tion using glass and in-house dig­i­tal print­ing to achieve the same high-end design expectations.

Exte­ri­or Signage

The chal­lenge with the exte­ri­or sig­nage was to cre­ate two immense sets of cus­tom fab­ri­cat­ed illu­mi­nat­ed let­ter pan­els and install them at the top of the hos­pi­tal, which has 12 lev­els above ground, and two below ground. Lat­i­tude Sig­nage experts trans­lat­ed archi­tec­tur­al ren­der­ings into a cus­tom sign solu­tion that looked like a carved stone con­struc­tion with edge-lit LEDs. Lat­i­tude engi­neered the exte­ri­or signs and worked with the archi­tec­tur­al façade firm to main­tain col­or con­sis­ten­cy for the exte­ri­or cladding. The results are pic­ture per­fect, a true rep­re­sen­ta­tion of archi­tec­tur­al signage.

Heart of the Matter

Col­lab­o­ra­tion was very impor­tant through­out this project to achieve the look and feel of all com­po­nents of this sig­nage sys­tem. From top to bot­tom this project embod­ies the Lat­i­tude team’s capa­bil­i­ties to engi­neer, man­u­fac­ture, and install a com­plete archi­tec­tur­al sig­nage pack­age as part of the plan­ning and con­struc­tion teams.

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