One of the strategies from the Brisbane City Council’s recently commissioned report, “Brisbane’s Unique Window of Opportunity,” is to establish stronger links with the Asia Pacific economy. Part of this strategy is to provide multilingual communication to international visitors, including signage and digital guides.

To help realize these goals and reinforce Brisbane's Lifestyle City strategy, the Brisbane City Council commissioned Dotdash to create multilingual signage in the city center. Based on the target audience of short-stay international tourists and long-stay international students, messages in Korean, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Arabic were introduced on 33 new, brightly colored directional signs installed within the city center, replacing English-only signs.

Using a kit-of-parts approach, Dotdash’s design relies on simple panel-and-post components that can be configured in a multitude of ways to suit a specific location. A post can support several panels of communication for a complex location or a single panel for a location that requires only one message. A busy location with several messages becomes more visible to the user by dedicating one message per panel. The signpost can support up to eight messages in four directions. The panels are either single- or double-folded and join to the posts in a number of configurations.

The design uses the existing street-sign posts and footings by sleeving a new square stainless steel post over the existing one. The sign panels are easy to change for future additions or updates. The kit-of-parts approach to the design integrates signage elements made of recyclable stainless steel and aluminum with existing structural components. The modularity of the panels advocates for ease of rotation, and anticipates the inevitability of future change.

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