Turning an existing naming system into an intuitive workplace experience
As AppDynamics expanded its San Francisco headquarters, the new sixth floor presented an opportunity to create an experience that felt connected to the company’s culture while making the space easy to navigate.
The existing conference rooms and phone booths throughout the office already had a well-established pop-culture naming system inspired by technology, games, movies, and music. Rather than introduce a new naming convention, we chose to build on something employees already knew and give it a stronger visual framework.
Creating a System, Not Just Signage
I art directed a wayfinding system that organized the floor into distinct, color-coded zones. Each area was assigned its own visual identity, creating intuitive cues that helped employees understand where they were—and recognize when they were headed in the right direction.
Color, environmental graphics, typography, and imagery worked together across conference rooms, phone booths, corridors, and shared spaces. The result was a navigation system that didn't rely solely on traditional directional signage. The environment itself became the wayfinding.
Building on the Culture
The visual system also gave us an opportunity to bring more personality into the workplace.
Instead of treating conference-room names as simple labels, we used their pop-culture themes as inspiration for environmental moments throughout the floor. Technology, games, movies, and music became part of the physical experience, allowing functional spaces to reinforce the personality and culture of AppDynamics.
Working in collaboration with Stout-SF, I helped establish and art direct the visual approach across the space, ensuring the individual expressions still felt like parts of one cohesive system.
An Experience Designed Around People
The goal wasn't to reinvent something employees already understood. It was to make it work harder.
By preserving the existing naming convention and layering in color, environmental graphics, and visual cues, we transformed a collection of individually named rooms into a connected experience that made a large workplace easier to understand, navigate, and remember.
The result was a flexible wayfinding system that balanced function, brand, and culture—using design to make a complex environment feel simple, as well as insert some fun in a workplace environment.