Project
Fio
Signage
Wayfinding
Environmental graphics
2025
The brief
Fio opened in April 2025 in a former textile mill in Campanhã, four brick buildings round a yard where the dye works used to be. There was no obvious front door. Visitors came in through the car park, the café or a loading bay, and the front desk counted people spending their first ten minutes looking for the entrance. The centre shows six exhibitions a year, so signs that named rooms after shows would be wrong by the summer. We had ten weeks, and a fabrication budget fixed by the city’s grant.
The idea
Follow the thread. The mill spun cotton for a hundred years, and Fio means thread, so the one mark of the system is a running stitch. Along a route the stitch ends in an arrow; on the door of the next room it ends in a knot, so visitors know they have arrived. Rooms are numbered, never named, and a new exhibition changes a banner rather than the building.
Standing signs
Glass and polished steel boards at the two gates, a glass pylon in the lobby, an oak-framed pylon in the yard and a yellow steel blade beside every staircase and lift. Room numbers are set large in Schibsted Grotesk, and the stitch beneath them ends in an arrow on the way and a knot on arrival.
Building signs
A lightbox on the timber cladding of the new entrance building, a blade on the brick of the old dye house and an oak block over the café door. These are the only signs that name anything: Fio and the café.
Monthly banners
Banners in steel frames at the gates and in the old hall show what is on this month, each month in one of twelve colours taken from the mill’s dye recipes: madder red, indigo, weld yellow. The exhibition’s initial is set large, Fio small.
Programme cubes
Stacked cubes in the yard carry the month’s programme on their faces, in the same dye colours. Fio’s technicians reprint and restack them on the first Monday of every month.
What changed
The signs went up over two nights in July 2025, before the summer exhibition opened. By August the front desk had stopped keeping its tally of lost visitors. The banners and cube faces are printed by Fio’s technicians from our templates, on a large-format printer in the old dye house.
Credits
Okapi: Tomás Reis (lead designer), Beatriz Correia (sign family), Ana Pires (banners and fabrication drawings), Marta Lobo (sign copy)
Fio: Laura Moura (director), Bruno Brandão (production manager)
With: signs made in steel, glass and oak by a metalwork shop in Gondomar; photography by Pedro Saraiva, Porto
