Wayfinding design is a blend of art and science. In planning accessible, consistent and integrated wayfinding signage, our process considers the essential practical elements in combination with the brand, style, and philosophy of the site. These elements include understanding the various user groups in relation to the destinations they seek. We get to know the routes, traffic flow, sightlines, and architecture that make up a user’s journey. On site testing, strategic brand integration, and layers of storytelling bring the system alive, indoors and out.

Signage is the literal voice of a story, brand, or organization, brought to life in a space. Our decades of experience working with cities, universities, developers, museums, and other complex institutions ensures the perfect combination of clear document preparation, project management, and detail-oriented design (link to client list). Our interior and exterior signage design projects range from one gateway feature sign to entire commercial or institutional campuses, to a complete city.

Signage guidelines provide clear and actionable instructions for future planning. They contain flexible signage designs that can be tailored as required to suit a future need, indicating scale, position, materiality, graphic quality, illumination, and method of mounting. Guidelines reflect a project’s brand, achitecture, and are supported by a review of signage bylaws. Lost & Found prepares guidelines for cities—to implement in the public realm and support affordable ways to add building and directional signage to civic destinations, such as libraries, parks, and community centres. In addition, our guidelines for commercial properties support developers, leasing agents and prospective tenants in planning and negotiating what is possible and permitted for any particular Commercial Retail Unit.

Found treasure, old tales, and new ways of seeing the everyday —interpretive planning and design is about exhibits and signage that share ideas and experiences. Whether in a museum gallery or the street, creating this work means grabbing peoples’ attention through sensory experience built on a great story. Our work includes full services from curating, researching, and writing that story to developing cases to display artifacts, to designing the material, graphic, and physical displays that allow interaction and engagement. Our work includes consideration of sound, lighting, projection, interactivity, and views to and through a building or landscape. All this is shared iterative packages of clear visualizations that allow clients to see what they will get, allow it to be costed and built to exacting specifications.

Our decades of experience in supporting Indigenous Host Nations cultural visibility in Vancouver, on the ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ peoples, has taught us that reconciliation is not abstract—it is here, now, and woven into the land and communities around us. Most importantly, we know that reconciliation is our work to do.

We have seen through experience in designing for parks and museums in this place, that the process of collaborating on design projects can play a role in facilitating and modelling aspects of reconciliation. Be it through listening to the words of others, uncovering shared goals, or discovering personal biases and privileges, when non-Indigenous and members of Host Nations communities work together, important lessons are learned. Our work can support that for your team.

Walk with us in taking steps that can expand newcomers and settlers' ability to appreciate alternative ways of seeing the world. Learn tangible ways of creating responsible and reciprocal environments that include Indigenous Peoples. The process itself is different than the design outcome, but almost always of greater value.

This work means leveraging our privilege to jam open the door for others to take centre stage. The designers at Lost & Found acknowledge our status as uninvited guests on unceded ancestral territory. Because of this, we approach design projects which share Indigenous cultural language, visuals, and knowledge it not as experts but as supporting cast members. Our role is to support the vision of the elders and knowledge carriers with our skills in signage, typography, graphic, and exhibition design.

We address imbalance in tangible ways. The design of our contracts and project workplans include a paid seat at the table for Indigenous artists, designers, writers, scholars, or curious youth. The work is rewarding to everyone in amplifying Indigenous voices, capacity-building for emerging designers, and enriching the culture of this place for everyone. Each project—whether interpretive, wayfinding, or collaborative—offers us deeper lessons and experiences on this shared path.

Strong brands are built through shaping clear messages and expressing them uniquely to connect to real people. Lost & Found’s roots in graphic design, logo design, and typography, and illustration blend with architectural expertise. We are dedicated to building design solutions that tell our clients’ story today and for the future. In creating brands for places and spaces, we research competition, trends, technology, materials, and media, to determine the best conceptual path and strategic framework for our client’s message. Creating and applying a brand look and feel across a wide variety of media is an essential part of what Lost & Found is all about. The work comes alive in both digital and 3D application in lights, signage, motion, maps, print, swag, and on-screen.