ONE ZA'ABEEL DUBAI
WAYFINDING FOR ONE OF THE WORLD'S BEST URBAN RESORTS.

Unique, sophisticated and confident this is a seven star destination that consists of one of the city’s most vaunted luxury urban hotels, One & Only as well as the trendy SIRO Hotel with a core focus on wellness. Aside from the hotel offerings some of Dubai’s hottest culinary plays can be found at One Za’abeel including Street XO and The Link.

When ICD approached Creative Dialog to undertake a detailed wayfinding and visitor experience program for this urban monument and extraordinary destination, we were thrilled to take on the challenge. Our approach to this very complex, muti layered environment was to get at the core of the problems found within the legacy scheme and to re imagine the guest experience and put forward a solid navigation strategy.

Picking up where the past wayfinding had failed, it was imperative to plug the gaps in the current scheme by providing prominent, legible and intuitive wayfinding across the exteriors to facilitate visitor arrival and navigation across the entire perimeter pointing to key destination arrival points to provide guests of all types a smooth arrival experience.

Our next task was to re-imagine the interiors which included reconfiguring the lifts and how they operated and to implement a site wide digital lift call button program along with clear lift level numbering and bespoke directories and maps that provide immediate level information to aid orientation and journey planning.

Our sleek and minimalist design approach for the interiors adopted a distinct graphic based wayfinding and information design system, centred around large arrows and use of the respective F&B logos, all contained in a slender and stylish frame. While outside our suite of wayfinding sign types speak to the monumental and cantilevered nature of the building envelope, where large, offset sign panels are stacked upon each other to deliver visitors strong navigational cues in what is an extremely busy road environment.