PARKING STRUCTURE 5

WAYFINDING | VINYL WRAPS

The Parking Structure 5 is the newest parking garage that was built to accommodate the growing student body at Sacramento State. UTAPS (University Transportation and Parking Services) was leading the PS5 building project and presented the senior design students with a wayfinding project that required us to come up with a design that would help people navigate the new parking garage while also showcasing the nature and wildlife that could be seen in the neighboring arboretum. For this project we were split up into teams of five and each group was tasked with creating column wraps and murals that would achieve this wayfinding goal. The parking structure has six floors and each team member needed to develop a design for their assigned floor while also keeping the designs cohesive as a group. The sixth floor would be a design that was developed by the entire group, in our case a mural that tied all of the floors together in a final piece that would be presented at the top of the parking structure. As a group we decided on using animals, bugs, and plants that can be found in the arboretum as the imagery that would be used in our design. For the design narrative we decided to have the animals’ life cycles displayed on different columns, while also keeping the floor’s color consistent with the animal/creature that’s presented for each floor and also matched the pantone colors that were already included in the parking structure’s current wayfinding system. For the top floor murals, vector designs that were designed by each designer in the team were then combined to create a cohesive mural that displayed imagery from each floor. 

Fortunately, the panel that we presented to liked our group’s design decision for the wayfinding system and decided to implement our designs throughout the parking garage structure. 

I was assigned floor five of the structure and the pantone color that was used in the current wayfinding system was a vibrant orange that I felt best correlated with the monarch butterfly which could be seen just about everywhere on campus, including the arboretum. Monarchs also have a very unique life cycle so this worked well with our group’s design narrative. 

Our Design Team: Lidia Lepe, Dryden Nagtalon, Alak Alkailani, Miranda Bunn, Maddy Bell