Elizabeth Line

Maynard's brief was to design a unified family of products and systems, creating a line-wide identity for Crossrail, the new high frequency railway for London and the South East. The railway opened in 2022 and has made travelling into and across London easier and quicker.

Photograph by Ruth Ward

We formed part of the multi-disciplinary C100 consortium for the Crossrail project alongside Atkins, Grimshaw and GIA Equation. Our aim was to design a modern, minimal, elegant and functional transport environment that enhances the passenger experience. Each station was designed by a different architectural and engineering team.

Our work focused on the below ground tunnel environments where a common design language was created with a family of architectural components and wayfinding strategy. The scope of the component packages included cladding, platform edge screens, seating, lighting, signage and customer information systems.

Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail

Product design

To develop and test designs, a life-size ‘mock-up’ of a station platform was built to enable the design team and stakeholders to understand the scale and detail of the tunnel environment. The mock-up has been visited by up to 1,500 people – clients, contractors, and design teams – and has been used as an extremely successful communication tool.

Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail
Crossrail

Wayfinding strategy

We began the project by undertaking a visual audit of existing networks and a review of global best practice in wayfinding. From our analysis and conclusions we worked with the station architects, external stakeholders and client team to develop a robust wayfinding strategy and a new sign family.

We then developed detailed design guidelines for all 2D and 3D design applications.

Graphic design

We developed a sign family based on existing standards, and detailed design guidelines for all members of the sign family including information hierarchies, type sizes and layout principles.

All station signs were integrated into the fabric of the architecture, and pilot schemes were used to test the proposals and collate budget costs for the wayfinding programme.