wayfinding
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The Printer That Learned to Build the Room
A Menlo Park color lab survived the digital revolution by becoming something harder to replace: the crew that turns a designer’s file into a place people can actually navigate, touch, and remember.
MS-Group: the family business that put its craft on the map
A Cardiff memorial business grew into a group that makes headstones, wraps vehicles and helps visitors find their way. The connection is closer than it looks.
Garnett Sign Studio and the business of being found
A $146,875 parking-sign bid opens a window into Garnett Sign Studio: a Bay Area fabricator whose work connects graphic design, tactile lettering and the everyday task of getting people where they need to go.
Clearstory makes the building easier to read
A children’s hospital, a former shipyard, a campus full of competing destinations: Clearstory turns complicated places into places people can understand. Its most revealing design tool is the question it asks before drawing the sign.
Motivational Systems, Inc. and the art of getting you there
A hospital corridor, a model-home turnoff, a library aisle: MSI works at the moment someone needs a clue. Its business shows how much thinking can hide inside a sign.
Keith & Co. makes a place easier to read
A confusing hallway, a neighborhood under construction, a museum finding its voice. Keith & Co. turns the practical business of getting people oriented into graphic design with a public life.
Solutions by Design builds the room around the screen
A Fresno design firm followed its clients from fruit packaging into orthodontic software and interactive museums. Its real specialty is making the content, the code, and the physical space work together.
JK & Co. knows what to keep
A storage building becomes an art gallery. A working winery becomes a place to linger. Inside the Los Angeles studio finding new uses for buildings that already have a past.
Best Signs knows where to put the words
A Palm Springs signmaker wrapped a casino entrance in 54 feet of LED display. Its quieter specialty is making buildings easier to read.
BLOSS makes the complicated city readable
A museum has six entrances. A transit agency has a growing cast of communicators. BLOSS builds the graphics, stories and systems that help people find their way in.
Golden Gate Sign Company sells the part of branding that needs a crane
A logo is easy to move on a screen. Golden Gate Sign Company handles the harder journey: through city approvals, into metal and light, and onto the buildings of the Bay Area.
Volume Inc. makes places you can read
A painted waterfront, a conference sign, a wall about prunes. The San Francisco studio finds the stories inside places - then gives people a reason to notice.
Fox Graphics knows a sign has a life after opening day
A San Diego sign shop makes a practical case for thinking beyond the logo: the wall it goes on, the people who read it, and the day it has to come down.
Signs Unlimited knows the small print matters
A San Jose sign maker finds the real work in the details: color-matched brackets, replaceable menu prices, and the last few feet between a brand and its building.
GNU Group makes the hard part of getting there disappear
A hospital entrance, a campus crossroads, a company name on a skyline. GNU Group turns these everyday encounters into a design problem - and stays involved until the signs are installed.
Signs of Success makes a building readable
A Santa Maria sign shop turns brand names, room numbers and school mascots into physical landmarks. Its most revealing work happens before the letters reach the wall.
Graphic Solutions gives a neighborhood its name in lights
The San Diego design firm makes gateways people remember and wayfinding systems they barely notice. Its real craft is getting identity, architecture and the next turn to agree.
Sprint Signs Makes the Last Few Feet of Finding a Business Count
A San Diego sign shop turns logos, directories and room markers into the physical language of a building. Its most revealing work happens between the artwork file and the installation.
RSM Design makes places worth finding
A parking garage can borrow the swagger of a concert poster. A former naval base can keep its bearings. RSM Design builds the visual clues that help a place make sense.
Fusion Sign and Design puts brands on the street
From homebuilder wayfinding to restaurant drive-thrus, Fusion has grown by taking on the work behind the sign. Its next test is making a national network feel like one dependable local shop.
whatcanitbe: A sign business that outgrew its walls
The public trail behind whatcanitbe leads to Gregory Signs, an Ontario fabricator whose work ranges from subway directions to retail branding. Its expansion story turns on a practical question: where do you put the next big order?
The Iron Range Kid Who Turned 25,000 Screens Into a Sale to Vista Equity
A hockey player from the Iron Range raised $350,000 from hometown investors and built a digital signage company that ran 25,000 screens. Twenty years later, a Vista Equity Partners firm bought it.
Robin
Robin is a Boston-based workplace management platform that helps companies run hybrid offices - booking desks and meeting rooms, mapping floor plans, managing visitors, and measuring how space actually gets used. Founded in 2014 by brothers Sam and Zach Dunn with Brian Muse, Robin now serves thousands of organizations worldwide, including HubSpot, Peloton, Riot Games and UNICEF, and has layered AI agents on top of the office to automate the busywork of getting people and rooms in the same place.
Soofa
Soofa builds solar-powered, network-connected digital signs that turn ordinary street corners into two-way community bulletin boards. Spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2014, the women-founded company started with a phone-charging park bench and grew into a network of zero-carbon kiosks that broadcast hyperlocal news, transit updates, and events while giving advertisers and cities measurable pedestrian data - smart, social, and sustainable street furniture for the modern city.
Ege Akpinar
Ege Akpinar is the founder and CEO of Pointr, the indoor location company behind Deep Location, a platform that gives buildings the kind of accurate blue-dot navigation people take for granted outdoors. He started it in 2013 as a Harrods consulting side project, turned it into a venue-mapping engine used by Fortune 100 companies, hospitals, airports and CES, and built an AI mapping system that compresses days of manual map-drawing into minutes.
Transcarent
Transcarent is a consumer-directed health and care platform built for self-insured employers and their employees. Founded in 2020 by Livongo creator Glen Tullman with General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja, it bundles 24/7 doctors, pharmacy, surgery, cancer and behavioral care into one app powered by its AI experience WayFinding. After its $621M merger with Accolade in 2025, the company now covers roughly 20 million Americans.