School Wayfinding Signage — North Royalton Middle School

North Royalton Middle School: signage that tells you where you are

Fifth and sixth grade hallway wayfinding columns at North Royalton Middle School — Fifth and sixth grade, named at the entrance to each corridor.

The first week of sixth grade is disorienting enough without the building working against you.

A middle school organised into grade hallways and pods makes complete sense once you know it. Before that — first week, open house night, a substitute teacher, a visiting parent — it is a lot of identical corridors.

North Royalton asked us to fix that throughout the building. We produced and installed signage for the main hallway, for the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade hallways, and for the pods inside them. Every corridor says what it is. Every pod has its name on it.

Seventh and eighth grade hallway wayfinding columns at North Royalton Middle School — Seventh and eighth grade, the same treatment.

Overhead directional wayfinding sign pointing to athletics and the fifth and sixth grade pods — Directional signage: athletics one way, the fifth and sixth grade pods the other.

We also branded the athletic hallway, which connects two gyms the school has always called the purple gym and the gold gym. Those names are part of how the building is spoken about — they just were not written down anywhere. Now they are.

Two DG Creativ installers fitting the athletics corridor header at North Royalton Middle School — Installing the athletics header.

Finished athletics corridor header graphic at North Royalton Middle School — The finished athletics corridor.

Three surfaces, one building

Not every wall takes the same material, so the project used three: smooth wall film where the surface was finished and flat, printed graphics for textured surfaces, and 3mm PVC for rigid signage.

The hardest of the three is painted cinder block. Block has a mortar joint every few inches and a rough face that fights the film. Done badly, the vinyl bridges across the joints instead of settling into them, and within a season it lifts at the edges — and it lifts at the corners first, where everyone sees it. Done properly, heat softens the film so it conforms down into the block face and the joints disappear.

The column graphics, the bear in the cafeteria and the cafeteria wrap are all on block.

Applying vinyl graphics to a painted cinder block column with a heat gun — Heat conforming the film into a block column.

Installer using a heat gun to conform large vinyl graphics to a painted cinder block wall — The same technique at scale.

Finished large vinyl graphic on painted cinder block with mortar joints visible through the film — Finished — on block, with the mortar joints still visible through the film rather than bridged over.

DG Creativ installers applying a cafeteria wall wrap at North Royalton Middle School during the school day — Installing the cafeteria wrap during the school day.

Finished Home of the Bears cafeteria wall wrap at North Royalton Middle School — Home of the Bears, finished.

We printed all of it and installed all of it ourselves, in the summer of 2026, before the building reopened.