Convincing orientation system by Mehnert Corporate Design GmbH & Co. KG

Dortmund. Wilopark, the global headquarters of the technology specialist, has received an award that is not exactly ordinary: the renowned Red Dot Design Award in the category Brands & Communication Design was given to the so-called signages as well as the pictograms in the Smart Factory and the Pioneer Cube. The jury particularly praised the clarity of the symbols as well as the intuitive recognition value of the pictograms, which enable simple and quick orientation on the site, which is about 26 football fields in size.

"Our goal was to create a comprehensive and intuitive orientation system that directly results from and perpetuates the architecture of the buildings, which can be applied not only to the new Wilo main site in Dortmund, Germany, but also to the other sites worldwide," says Martin Linge-Boom, Head of Corporate Real Estate Management at Wilo. The special damand was that the orientation system had to be visible in a wide variety of architectures without appearing too obtrusive.

"As a solution, we developed a system that uses a black cube as its basic shape," explains Prof. Kurt Mehnert, owner of Mehnert Corporate Design GmbH & Co. KG. The cube can be varied in size or combined and its shape can be seen to different degrees depending on the situation. "Waymarkers need a long-distance effect and now use the entire cube to achieve the greatest possible attention with the help of all cube sides." The colour design with white lettering or white pictograms on a black background ensures optimum legibility even from a distance.

"We are an international company and always have colleagues, customers and partners from all over the world visiting us at Wilopark," Martin Linge-Boom reports. "Our signage, with its clear shapes and pictograms, is language-neutral and thus universally understandable." He is particularly pleased that such seemingly everyday and unfortunately far too often and far too easily overlooked things as signage are awarded. "Together with Mehnert Corporate Design GmbH & Co. KG put a lot of time, a lot of brainpower and a great deal of heart and soul into the signage, so this prize is both an award and an incentive for us to give even the supposedly small things at Wilopark the attention they deserve."