Vienna Design Week Signage System
Designing a wayfinding system for 50.000 visitors at the Vienna Design Week 2025.
As part of the design collective Gemeindebau, together with Max Kure and Anton Posch, we designed and coordinated the wayfinding system for the 2025 Vienna Design Week — Austria's largest design festival, with around 50.000+ visitors. The visual design was one by Fredmansky.
A Temporary Home
The venue was Wiedner Hauptstraße 52 in Vienna's 4th district: a former car dealership and bodyshop that got repurposed for the festival. The first plans and traces told us, that it housed the Gasthaus "Zur grünen Weintraube", a neighborhood institution whose ghosts you can still feel in the bones of the building.
The space is borrowed, not owned, and the festival treats it accordingly. Every element we introduced understood itself as a guest — freestanding, adaptive, deferring to the character and conditions of the space rather than imposing its own.
Three Parts, One Job
Rather than mounting information to walls, we built a freestanding post system that could be placed anywhere on the floor. The design uses just three parts: a floor-mounted clamp, a notched round timber post, and an interchangeable panel. The same components work at an entrance, inside a hall, or right beside a single exhibit.
The approach draws on a principle we carried over from our work on the Klima Biennale: keep the component count low and make everything reusable. Fewer parts means faster setup, less waste, and a system that can grow or shrink as the programme changes without requiring new production each time.
Getting it There
The design was only half the job. Our role also covered coordinating between the festival team, graphics partner Fredmansky, and printing partner. From the first site visits through to installation.
Credits
Vienna Design Week, Fredmansky, Graphics, PerfectCut, Printing, Gemeindebau: Max Kure, Anton Posch, Special thanks to Fabio Spink and Lucy Li