Littleton Downtown Signage & Wayfinding

Littleton Downtown Signage & Wayfinding Littleton, colorado

Goals of the Signage & Wayfinding System

• Placemaking – reinforcing a sense of place for downtown Littleton & enhancing downtown Littleton’s distinct image, brand, and identity

• Legibility – highlighting important community resources and destinations, and how to access them & increasing driver safety through clearly deﬁned directional information

• Raise community and visitor awareness of Downtown Littleton (including its location)

• Direct visitors to Downtown Littleton from major transportation arteries

• Enhance visitors’ and residents’ ability to easily navigate Downtown, and ﬁnd desired destinations (including parking)

• Economic Development – increase awareness of the downtown core, helping to increase tax revenues, and generate redevelopment interest and investment

• Increase the success and market potential for retail, dining, arts, entertainment, and economic growth and redevelopment in Downtown Littleton

• Support the City’s commitment to downtown economic growth and redevelopment

Creating pedestrian-scale maps that illustrated the destinations and routes in and around the historic downtown core was a critical component of the signage and wayfinding project. The pedestrian maps show both historic and cultural destinations, walking times, and connections to trails, parks, and the downtown Littleton light rail station. Each pedestrian and auto sign has a unique historic photo at the top, rendered in 3Form, which allows light to pass through the image and for the image to be illuminated at night. Here, the image shows hula hoopers competing in a competition on Main Street in the 1950’s. At the bottom of the pedestrian map, this hula hoop image is repeated, along with an explanatory caption.

Located at the intersection of Prince Street and Santa Fe Drive (a state highway), the main gateway sign announces arrival into downtown Littleton, and promotes the downtown from the closet major arterial. As a note, during stakeholder outreach done as part of the Ladies Only Sample Tour, the survey results indicated that it was very difficult to know that downtown Littleton existed, and a gateway located along Santa Fe Drive would greatly improve awareness of, and navigation to, downtown Littleton.

There are many rich historic stories to tell in downtown Littleton, but limited space within the sidewalk right-of-way created a dilemma for installing historic interpretive panels. In order to create a discrete footprint for the interpretive signage – as well as a compelling and dynamic shape that draws people in – a totem pole interpretive signage system was developed. The 4-sided interpretive poles tell the stories of downtown Littleton’s significant buildings, people, and places. All content for the interpretive signs was finalized in conjunction with the Littleton Museum (a nationally recognized Smithsonian museum) curation staff.

This view of the auto-pedestrian sign illustrates the auto navigational information. Each destination was selected through working with community stakeholders to identify the most important assets within and adjacent to the historic downtown core. Viewed from west looking east, this sign has a view toward the historic courthouse building, so a historic image of the courthouse was selected for the top panel 3Form piece. At night, the red squares behind the directional arrows, the top image, and the yellow side color band are all illuminated. A band of white light also illuminates the directional text, ensuring it’s visible for cars at night.

One of the most significant issues identified by the downtown Littleton merchant community was the difficulty of alerting visitors and shoppers of the businesses located along the side streets that connect Main Street and Alamo Street. Unlike most historic downtowns, downtown Littleton has one-way traffic split between two streets – Main and Alamo. In response to this traffic pattern, there are many vibrant businesses located along the side streets that connect these two major auto access points into downtown Littleton. The side street signs were developed to allow for individual businesses to purchase slide-in panels that promote their business with a name and a color-coded icon that illustrates their business (eating, art gallery, bookstore, etc). To date, the panels have not been completed (although the signage supporting them is in place), but 100% of the available advertising slots have been taken, and a waiting list exists. In order to have an advertising panel, businesses had to submit an application to the City of Littleton Economic Development Department.

Pedestrian map detail

Objectives of the Signage & Wayfinding System Design

• Focus on the longevity of the signs with an emphasis on quality materials and manufacturing techniques that would withstand time and the elements

• Emphasize efficiency and low energy use by employing LED lighting within the signs and limiting illuminated signs to prominent pedestrian locations

• Share Littleton’s story by including historic imagery, storytelling and interpretation throughout the downtown

• Support the pedestrian experience of the downtown by including a walking map with destinations, distances and times

• Plan for the future by arranging for continued, contracted maintenance of the signs

Pedestrian Maps

Information-Gathering & Stakeholder Outreach

Understanding the context for signage and wayﬁnding within the downtown project area was critical to the overall success of the signage and wayﬁnding plan. During the early project stages, the design team researched the existing physical conditions of the site, as well as documents and plans pertaining to signage and wayﬁnding. Once a general understanding of the project area and established planning/regulatory documents was complete, the team began to reach out to stakeholders and the public, asking them to provide insight and direction regarding important ideas and locations for signage, aesthetic and functional preferences for design concepts, and how signage could help create a more legible and inviting downtown environment.

The feedback and perspectives gained during stakeholder outreach provided a wealth of knowledge and understanding to the design team. The ﬁnal design palette is grounded in the ideas gleaned through dialog and communication with stakeholders, who gave generously of their time during each project stage.

Preliminary signage design options

The downtown Littleton signage and wayﬁnding design draws from feedback and direction received from a wide variety of stakeholders, community members, merchants, property owners, artists, historians and people walking, biking and shopping in downtown Littleton. As the conversations moved from preliminary concepts into ﬁnal design and reﬁnements of this design, the importance of being true to the intrinsic character of downtown were at the forefront of every decision. To this end, every adjustment – both large and small – grew from an increasingly deeper awareness of what it means to be in downtown Littleton, and how to bring this sense of place to life in the signage and wayﬁnding program. At a basic level, the signage was developed to provide clarity regarding what is available in Littleton, and how to negotiate within the physical environment to ﬁnd these resources, amenities and destinations.

Sign Package

Signage construction detail sheets

New street sign designs

Side Street Signs

Merchant Advertising

The final side street signs will have advertisement blades with the name of businesses and an icon representing their type of shop

Created By

Kristin Cypher

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