The Nordstrom Sign Program

My Role: Graphic Design Manager

2015: The Sign Shop

As the incoming Graphic Design Manager for Nordstrom’s Visual Merchandising, I inherited a program known as The Sign Shop that had many inconsistencies and an outdated guide. With downtime between team projects, I explored ways of improving the library one department at a time. This included defining new components in the system, streamlining content, and creating a library of documentation to quickly understand usage.

2016: Laying the groundwork

I interviewed merchants and marketing managers to better understand the sign ordering process and requested feedback from stores on customer’s interaction with signage. I discussed with my team what we heard from store managers and marketers about the purpose of signing. We learned that overall there was a general belief that more was better.

In 2017 over 1,634,942 signs were ordered from over 1133 templates. 

2017: Conflicting direction

I examined how signs were used in-store, documented installation, and made notes on best practices. I did an audit of the template library and worked with engineering to identifying common elements and quantity of usage over time. I also partnered with Store Design on implementing sign holders for new stores. I learned that they believed signs were only for brands and that paper signs were temporary and should be removed as soon as possible. I asked myself, but what about promotions? How can we create uniformity in our signing system to make ordering easier?

2018: The Nordstrom Sign Program

Establishing the Design language for The Nordstrom Sign Program was as much about design as perception. I had to change the mind-set from a commodity-driven “sign shop” to a design service model that was home to a sign ordering website. However, the first step was taking all of our learning and cleaning up the program.

Design Principles
Leadership had been talking about The Nordstrom Pillars in meetings for years, but it was never clear on how these pillars informed design. Taking these pillars we brainstormed keywords that would define the principles that we would use as the direction in our everyday work. 

Elements
Once we defined the principles the fun began. Color, typography, spacing, hierarchy, flow, and much more all had to be revisited. Redundancies and inconsistencies throughout the signing system were initially hard to deal with, but we were able to reduce the number of templates by refining existing templates to serve more needs.

2020: Leaving it better than I found it.

When my role was eliminated due to Covid, I was happy to have left a program with fewer templates, more flexibility, an accurate and well-documented guide, and a team that could support changing needs using informed design principles.