How we created the Uffizi Galleries map

The project for the Uffizi Galleries map began in July 2018. It was a long process of studying the museum's architecture and researching the visual style for the floor plan design.

The Uffizi Galleries' challenge was to have a single map holding all the information visitors need, the routes and the rules, in a way that is clear, concise and usable by many types of visitors at once.

The goal

The Uffizi Galleries needed new wayfinding signage, plus a simplified, easy-to-read map to hand out to visitors along with their ticket.
They needed an overall 2D map of the entire museum, showing the entrances for visitors with and without reservations, the accessible entrance and all the different exits.
The map also had to show the layout of the floors, the recommended routes, the accessible routes, the open rooms, the location of the ticket offices, the available services, stairs, elevators, safety information, rules, recommended itineraries, accessibility information, opening hours and prices for each museum (including Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens), and the location of the museum's most important works.

One map, many different visitors

The Galleries needed a map that would be useful and usable for a wide range of visitors, whose needs fell into these categories:

Quick: the typical tourist who wants to discover Florence and see as much of it as possible in 3 days. The Uffizi is a must-see, but they can spare no more than a couple of hours, during which they want to see the most popular works by Botticelli, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo in person. The map had to deliver this information at a glance: essentially, we had to find a way to guide visitors to the rooms holding what they are looking for, without letting them wander through an endless choice of Renaissance works and risk missing what they really came to see. This tourist visit is defined as "Quick", so we needed a route lasting under 2 hours.

Accessible: people with reduced mobility, who need to know where the accessible entrances and elevators are. There are also visitors with visual impairments; for them the museum offers dedicated routes for the visually impaired, which had to be clearly marked on the map.

Complete: art lovers come from all over the world for a full museum experience and don't want to miss the most important works of the Renaissance. For them, the ideal was a "Classic" route lasting over 2 hours, taking in all the museum's most important rooms.

Returning: some visitors come back to the Galleries several times a year; for them the museum offers annual tickets called "Passepartout". This information also had to be conveyed on the map. On top of that, the maps had to present the rules and safety regulations clearly and efficiently, and be understandable regardless of the visitor's country and culture.

An unusual route

The museum visit starts on the second floor, so visitors begin by climbing the Grand Ducal Staircase all the way to the top. Visually explaining that the route starts on the second floor and works its way down to the ground floor was one of the key challenges of the maps.

A lot to say in a small space

To be effective, the map had to fit a great deal of very different information into a limited space without losing clarity. Beyond the map itself, it had to encode the routes available for each type of visitor and the overall flow of the visit, and clearly show the entrances for each ticket type and the different exits for each route.

The starting point

Before working remotely on any kind of graphics, we carried out in-depth research into maps from many settings, from museums to gardens and palaces, to better define the art direction.

Once the moodboards were created and the visual style chosen, the real work on the first map drafts began, starting from the museum's existing floor plans (img 1), drawn several decades ago. The first task was to simplify the lines while staying highly faithful to the space and its proportions.

The icons

To mark the services, along with all the wayfinding information, we needed an icon system in a style consistent with the map and the brand. The icons were drawn using a line-based language with a very contemporary look & feel.

Although the first icon set was on brand and gave the maps a very modern, contemporary look, it wasn't helping us solve one of the biggest challenges we faced. As mentioned, the museum welcomes people from all over the world, with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, so the iconography had to be as international as possible. The Uffizi director, a German living in Florence, fully understood this need, and it was he who suggested we look for a solution like the ones found in airports: international icons that everyone understands because we see them everywhere. So we set out to create a new icon set, further from the modern look we had been aiming for but more attuned to the needs of a large and diverse audience. Many of the icons are the internationally used ones, redrawn on a specific grid and following a strict system of sizes and spacing.

This new icon set then became the basis for the wayfinding and signage inside and outside the museum, not only at the Uffizi but also at Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens.

Floors and routes

Finding a clear way to represent the different floors and routes was no easy task.
We started with an isometric view of each floor, following the first visual style we had chosen for the design: modern and architectural. As much as we liked it, it didn't work for every type of visit and visitor.

The second attempt started from an illustration of the Uffizi Galleries courtyard, but with a false, more open perspective, so we could show all the information about entrances, ticket offices and exits, and above all the 2 routes, "Quick" and "Classic".
This map provides general information and on its own solves several communication challenges.

The floor plans

The first and second map drafts had an architectural mood: very clean, linear and modern, using the gold brand color for lines and backgrounds and black for icons and text.
Draft 01 placed all 3 floors on the same side of the brochure, with the artworks in the last panel. In draft 02 we decided to move the ground floor to the other side of the brochure, since it has no artworks to see but is heavily used for wayfinding. This left more room for floors 1 and 2, and we rotated the sheet 180 degrees. With the extra space, we were able to connect the artworks to their rooms more visibly.

Although the client liked this first floor plan design, and it met the various requirements and successfully solved several challenges, it still didn't feel aligned with the final goal. Perhaps the overall look & feel was too cold: being a major institution doesn't mean communication has to be formal, modern and serious.

So we went looking for a friendlier style, more in line with the Boboli map that had already been approved and printed, where colorful vector illustrations made the map far more approachable for every type of visitor.

This is the result of the style update for the new floor plans. As you can see, the approach is warmer: it still uses the gold brand color, but applies it differently, with a light gold for the background and a darker gold for the structure. We also added a shadow and a colorful illustration of the Arno river; the final look & feel is now friendlier and lighter.

Draft 02 had already explored using images of the most important works linked to their rooms, to speed up interaction once visitors are inside the museum. But instead of linking them directly within each room, we created a system that shows the "Quick (blue)" and "Classic (fuchsia)" routes like subway lines: the route is marked on the floor plan, and below each floor's map are the must-see works found in each room.

The map is currently being tested and will be offered to visitors as a PDF on the Uffizi website. We hope to gather feedback from visitors to further improve the user experience.

The final result

The brochure contains all the information about the Uffizi Galleries: an introduction to their history, opening hours and ticket prices, and all the rules visitors must follow.
It also includes floor plans for each floor and an illustrated view of each route. An additional map shows where the Uffizi sits within Florence's historic center and explains how to reach the other museums that make up the Uffizi Galleries complex.

Size

The final brochure follows the format set for the Boboli Gardens map: the open map is A2, folded twice crosswise into a closed A5 format.

Paper

All the maps are printed on 100% recycled paper. This was proposed from the very start of the project and backed by the whole Uffizi team, above all by director Schmidt. Knowing the costs would be higher than average, the director was mindful of the environmental impact and chose to help reduce the product's environmental footprint as much as possible.

Next steps

Alongside the physical work, there's a great opportunity to enrich the digital experience with an interactive map: a fully explorable virtual space, so visitors can access up-to-date information on whatever device they choose.

The information architecture would run through DatoCMS, keeping all content centralized. This would let every experience, from the app to potential VR experiences, be updated at the same time with a single click. The same would apply to print: imagine temporary exhibitions that, once updated in an app, also sync to the print file for the paper version.

Acknowledgments

The support of the entire Uffizi Galleries team was essential throughout every phase of the project, in particular architect Antonio Godoli, together with Bianca Maria Landi, Angela Pintore, Maria Spanò and Andrea Biotti, who guided us toward the ideal solutions for the specific use case and were always available to clear up any doubts. We also owe special thanks to director Eike Schmidt for the trust placed in us with this important assignment.