Signage – Foyer du Servan

The ‘Foyer du Servan’ in Lausanne, Switzerland welcomes about 20 girls and boys from 6 to 16 years old with family, social or personal difficulties. This building becomes their home. To include the children and staff in the design process, we ran a workshop with them to select fonts, pictograms and patterns that they felt would best represent their home. After the workshop we analyzed their selections to define a graphical language.

The choice of the rounded font was unanimous amongst all the children and adults who participated in the workshop. We also noticed that the children systematically drew characters in action for the pictograms. (For example, ‘waste’ is represented by a person throwing waste, not just a trash can). This drove us to use representations of character in action for all the pictograms and the motifs used on the windows.