As Maynard’s Aotearoa New Zealand office grows, our local team in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington continues to bring Maynard’s expertise in wayfinding, brand, and design strategy to the south end of the North Island, working on projects that connect deeply with the communities here. A handful of recent projects in the office reflect the cultural richness and sustainable aspirations of the region, taking in a kaupapa Māori brand identity, an urban micromobility wayfinding system, and wayfinding strategy for libraries and community centres.

As part of Wellington City Council’s push to revitalise libraries and community spaces, we created a wayfinding strategy for updated exterior signage at libraries and community centres. Building on existing Council guidelines, we identified opportunities for improvement in both graphic and product design, resulting in signage that welcomes visitors and provides clear context for passers-by. Our final designs and installation documentation enabled the Council to move seamlessly from concept to delivery.

Our identity for Porirua Assembly serves the first Te Tiriti-based citizens’ assembly in Aotearoa. Ngāti Toa Rangatira and the Porirua community have brought together 50 everyday people to deliberate on climate issues, with recommendations going directly to decision makers.

Our role was to ensure the Assembly’s identity carried the mana, clarity, and warmth the kaupapa demanded. Through collaborative discussions with mana whenua and assembly leadership, we surfaced an existing narrative and distilled it into a crafted brand framework: To connect. To discuss. To act. The result is an identity that supports not only the Assembly’s recommendations but also the way the process has reshaped expectations of how decisions are made in our communities.

For Hutt City Council we developed a comprehensive micromobility wayfinding system which helps make journeys by bike, scooter, and other micromobility modes attractive, easy to plan and effortless from beginning to end. We utilised a customer-centric model to ensure the system meets the needs of the full breadth of people using micromobility in the Hutt.

Beyond project work, urban furniture innovation has emerged as an area of interest for the studio. For the 2025 edition of Park(ing) Day, we took over a single car park on Cuba Street with adaptable modular streetscape furniture, exploring how impermanent objects could encourage different kinds of interactions when pushed beyond a standard park bench approach. Responding to WCC’s ideas competition for cycle separation infrastructure, we explored how modular construction systems could be fused with landforms to create functional responses embedded with a sense of place.