Signage for Warehouses & Industrial Facilities

The problem industrial signage actually solves

A warehouse or manufacturing facility runs on identification systems that have nothing to do with ADA compliance: rack numbers, aisle markers, dock and bay identification, and floor marking that tells a forklift operator or a picker exactly where to go. Life safety and egress signage exists in the same building and is a separate discipline with its own code requirements. Treating both as one undifferentiated category of signage is how facilities end up over-specifying one and under-specifying the other.

Lake County sits on the I-94 and US-41 logistics corridor, which has drawn significant distribution and fulfillment development. Bridge Point North, a 225-acre industrial park in Waukegan, and Amazon’s fulfillment operations, including a 627,000 square foot facility at 1750 Bridge Drive and a 501,000 square foot facility at 3940 S Lakeside Drive, represent the scale of industrial space in the corridor. Facilities at this scale, and smaller manufacturing and distribution operations throughout the county, share the same core signage needs even when their products and processes are completely different.

Rack, aisle, dock and bay identification is not ADA signage

This is the distinction that matters most for industrial facilities. Operational identification signage, meaning rack numbers, aisle markers, dock doors and bay numbers, exists to move product and people through the facility efficiently. It is aimed at forklift operators, pickers and warehouse staff, and it is not the kind of permanent room or space identification signage that triggers the ADA’s Section 216 tactile and braille requirements.

Egress and life safety signage in the same building is a different matter. Signs identifying the doors at exit stairways, exit passageways and exit discharge require both tactile and visual compliance (2010 ADA Standards 216.4.1), the same as in any other occupancy type, while exit and egress directional signs elsewhere need visual characters only (2010 ADA Standards 216.4.3). We scope these as separate specifications within the same project: operational signage built for function and viewing distance, egress signage built to the applicable code.

Sizing for the actual viewing distance

An office door sign gets read from three feet away by someone standing in front of it. Warehouse signage gets read from a forklift moving down an aisle, or from fifty feet away across a distribution floor. Character height, sign placement and mounting height all have to account for that, which usually means characters several times larger than anything in an office building, and overhead placement where a wall-mounted sign would be invisible from the aisle.

We size every sign in an industrial project to where it actually gets read from, not a default office specification applied to a different kind of building.

Durability and floor marking

Dust, forklift traffic, washdown cycles and chemical exposure all shorten the useful life of signage that was not specified for the environment it is going into. A dry storage warehouse, a food-grade washdown facility and a manufacturing floor with airborne particulate each call for different substrates, finishes and mounting hardware. We specify to the actual conditions in each zone during the field survey rather than defaulting to one industrial-grade standard for the whole building.

Floor marking, meaning aisle lines, pedestrian walkways, staging areas and equipment zones, is part of the same identification system as overhead and wall signage. We coordinate floor marking layout with the rest of the wayfinding plan so a picker or visitor reads one consistent system, not a floor plan and a signage plan that were designed separately.

Visitor and contractor routing in an active facility

Getting a non-employee safely to a check-in point in a working warehouse or manufacturing facility is a different problem than an office lobby. Forklift traffic, restricted zones and PPE requirements all shape where visitor and contractor signage needs to point, and the signage has to work with your safety team’s existing protocols, not replace them.

Where we start

Industrial projects typically start with a field survey of the facility, zone by zone, to identify what is operational identification, what is egress and life safety, and what environmental conditions apply where. Tell us about your facility and we will scope from there, scheduled around your shift patterns and active operations.