How better branding, signage and wayfinding can improve high street experience and placemaking
This piece was developed in collaboration with Widd, a signage and brand environment specialist with more than 136 years of experience helping retailers, developers and place-makers translate design intent into physical reality. Together, we’ve been exploring a simple but important question: what makes a physical place easier to use, easier to navigate and ultimately more worth coming back to?
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the future of high streets and town centres in the UK, and how they need to evolve to stay relevant, vibrant and commercially successful.
Through conversations connected to HighStreetPositives, and with people working across retail, placemaking, regeneration and place management, one theme keeps coming up in a very practical way – how people actually experience a place once they arrive.
Not the strategy documents or masterplans, but the lived experience of moving through a high street, shopping centre or town centre.
Think about the last high street or town centre you visited somewhere new. How easy was it to understand where you were, how the place worked, and where things were? Or did you mostly stick to the most obvious route without really exploring?
Those small, almost unconscious decisions shape the overall experience of a place far more than is often recognised in high street design and placemaking.
While physical retail still accounts for around 72% of retail spend, people are not just visiting high streets to shop. They are meeting friends, going for coffee, attending events, accessing services, discovering independent businesses and spending time in their communities. The way people move through a place sits right at the centre of that experience.
Good signage, wayfinding and branding sit underneath all of this. When they work well, they are barely noticed. When they don’t, they shape the entire perception of a place.
Great high streets start with people
One of the strongest themes that comes through in conversations about successful high streets, town centres and retail destinations is that they do not begin with signage systems, layouts or design frameworks. They begin with people and how those people use and experience a place.
A high street is simply a setting for everyday life. It is where people meet, pass through, stop for a coffee, browse independent shops, visit services, attend events, and spend time in their local community.
So the starting point has to be understanding that behaviour.
🌸 Does the place feel welcoming on arrival
🌸 Does it reflect local character and identity
🌸 Is it easy to understand and navigate
🌸 Does it encourage people to explore beyond the obvious route
Every place has its own identity and rhythm. A market town, a coastal high street, a commuter town and a city centre retail district all operate differently. The strongest high street environments tend to reflect that rather than trying to standardise the experience.
When people feel connected to a place, they naturally stay longer, explore more widely, and are more likely to return.
High street wayfinding and helping people discover more
Most people do not experience a high street as a sequence of individual shops. They experience it as a journey from arrival to exploration.
From the station, bus stop or car park into cafés, shops, community spaces, cultural venues and public spaces – all connected as part of one wider town centre experience.
The question is whether that journey feels intuitive.
Can people easily understand how the place is laid out?
Can they confidently find what they came for?
Do they discover new things as they move through it?
Or do they stick to the most familiar and obvious route?
This is where high street wayfinding and signage design play a much bigger role than they are often given credit for.
Done well, wayfinding does more than help people navigate. It influences movement, discovery and dwell time. It can be the difference between someone walking past a side street or choosing to explore it and find a café, independent business, gallery or local market they did not expect.
As Sarah Beaumont, Marketing Director at Widd, explains:
“Part of the reason it ends up inconsistent is that wayfinding tends to be specified late, once the bigger decisions about layout, materials, and finishes have already been made. At that point, the signage has to work around the environment rather than being designed as part of it. The places that get this right tend to have had those conversations earlier, when sign positioning, material choices, and sightlines could still be considered alongside everything else. This way, we can make the visitor journey feel intuitive and considered and add to the overall experience.”
In practice, successful high street wayfinding often comes down to simple but critical details:
🌸 Clear and visible entrances
🌸 Easy-to-find toilets, lifts and key public facilities
🌸 Logical connections between different parts of a town centre or retail area
🌸 Confidence to explore without needing constant reorientation
When these basics work well, people move through places more naturally. They slow down, look up, and are more open to discovering what is around them.
Consistency across physical and digital high street experiences
Today, people experience high streets and retail destinations across multiple channels. A visit might begin on social media, continue in person, and extend afterwards through online browsing or sharing.
The experience moves between digital and physical touchpoints constantly.
This is where consistency becomes important – not in a rigid branding sense, but in recognition and coherence. A feeling that everything belongs to the same place, even when experienced in different ways.
In physical environments, achieving this consistency is more complex than it appears.
As Sarah explains:
“And this is harder to achieve than it sounds. Colour consistency alone is a significant technical challenge – the same brand colour can look very different depending on whether it’s printed, painted, applied as vinyl, or illuminated from behind. Interior lighting, natural daylight, and the substrate the colour is applied to all affect how it reads. Getting this right across multiple locations or touchpoints requires more than brand guidelines. It requires the manufacturing and specification knowledge to translate those guidelines into physical reality.”
In this context, branding in the built environment is not just about visual identity. It is about clarity, orientation and confidence.
It also extends into the practical elements of high street experience:
🌸 Staff help points
🌸 Customer service areas
🌸 Changing rooms
🌸 Toilets
🌸 Lifts
🌸 Entrances
When these are easy to find and understand, the overall experience of a place becomes more seamless and accessible.
Final thoughts: better high streets through better experience design
There is a lot of focus right now on how high streets need to evolve to remain relevant, competitive and commercially viable.
But some of the most impactful improvements are not always the most visible. They are the ones that shape how a place feels to move through on a day-to-day basis.
Whether a high street makes sense on arrival. Whether people feel comfortable exploring beyond the obvious route. Whether they discover independent businesses, community spaces and local experiences they did not expect. And whether the overall experience encourages them to stay longer and return.
In reality, the most successful high streets are not necessarily the most complex. They are often the most legible.
That sense of ease is rarely accidental. It is shaped through decisions about placemaking, signage strategy, wayfinding design, branding and the small but important details that influence how people behave in a space.
As Sarah Beaumont puts it:
*”Getting the physical environment right is a practical challenge as much as a creative one. The best outcomes tend to happen when the people responsible for manufacturing and installing signage are involved early enough to shape the specification, not just execute it – but it takes the whole project team thinking about the experience from the start.
When that happens, wayfinding stops being a functional add-on and becomes part of what makes a place feel genuinely easy and enjoyable to be in. People find their way without thinking about it. The brand feels coherent. The space does its job.
That’s what good high streets do well. And it’s what the best signage and wayfinding work, at every scale, is trying to achieve.
In practice, this is an area explored by a number of specialists working across environments and signage systems – including companies like Widd – where the focus is often on the same challenge: how to make places easier to read, easier to navigate, and more consistent from one touchpoint to the next, whether that’s inside a store or across a wider town or city centre.
At its core, it’s about helping people feel orientated quickly, so the experience of a place feels clearer, more welcoming, and easier to trust.”*
Because when high streets are easier to use, people stay longer, explore more, and return more often.
And that is where stronger, more successful places begin.
