Urban Park Wayfinding

A Complex Problem

O-day’min Park turned a cluster of downtown surface parking lots into a beautiful civic park, opened in November 2025 as a catalyst project under Edmonton’s Capital City Downtown Plan. The signage had three jobs at once: introduce a park whose name most visitors were encountering for the first time, connect the site outward to transit, Jasper Avenue, and the Legislature grounds, and identify an architecturally significant pavilion without competing with it. Urban park wayfinding at this level has to satisfy the City’s system standards and the design team’s intent in the same breath.
 

A Simple Solution

Hi Signs fabricated and installed the park’s signage program. Freestanding totems carry park identification, an oriented district map, transit connections with walk times, amenity pictograms, and system coding, built to the City’s pedestrian wayfinding standard so the park reads as part of downtown rather than an island within it. At the pavilion, applied glazing graphics deliver building identification, civic address, accessibility and washroom pictograms, and hours of operation across a fully glazed facade, sized and placed to sit inside the architecture rather than on top of it.
 

The Result

Visitors arriving from Corona Station or any of the surrounding streets orient in seconds, and the park connects legibly to the rest of the core instead of ending at its own property line. The pavilion has since been recognized with a 2024 Canadian Architect Award of Excellence and a 2026 Governor General’s Medal in Architecture. Executing signage inside a project at that standard, to a national design team’s intent and a municipal system spec at the same time, is the clearest measure of what Hi Signs was built to do.