Image Credit : Photographer – Rix Ryan Photography
Project Overview
Situated in Ipswich, 40km south-west of Brisbane’s CBD, the Nicholas Street Precinct is a landmark retail and mixed-use development, commissioned by Ipswich City Council to revitalise the heart of the city. Designed by Buchan Group, the project marks the most significant transformation of the Ipswich CBD in over 30 years.
The revitalisation has delivered more than 14,500m² of landscaped public space, improved amenities, a strong focus on placemaking and public art, an impressive piazza events space, and a pedestrian-friendly high street. With a curated mix of retailers, cafes, restaurants, and entertainment venues, the Nicholas Street Precinct is redefining Ipswich as a contemporary destination for locals and visitors alike.
The site’s wayfinding system was designed to enhance pedestrian connectivity in the car-focused semi-regional centre, encouraging walkability between the entertainment venue, retail areas, civic spaces and the car park. It supports intuitive exploration of the revitalised area, helping users navigate independently while fostering a strong sense of place and extending the experience of the surrounding urban environment.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Director - Angela Stephens
Lead Designer – Brett Gosbell
Industrial Designer – Thomas Smart, Mark Ambrosini
Wayfinding Strategist – Lucy Martin, Chad Ward
Senior Designer – Sidonie Prentice, Sophie Hogben
Design Manager – Niels Heyvaert, Simon Wilson
Architect – Buchan Group
Builder – Hutchinson Builders
Project Manager – Ranbury, Savills Australia
Signage / Feature Wall Contractor – The Blueprint
Skylight Contractor – G.James
Photographer – Rix Ryan Photography
Project Brief
Nicholas Street Precinct is the vibrant heart of Ipswich – a hub for business, retail, culture, and family life, designed to host a rich program of events, entertainment, and experiences that bring the community together. This is a city-shaping renewal project decades in the making. As revitalisation works progressed, the opportunity to deliver a leading user experience became clear.
Our approach celebrates the best of Nicholas Street Precinct, through a design language inspired by place, fostering a dynamic and active city centre that resonates with the people of Ipswich and strengthens their connection to it.
We were tasked with developing a wayfinding strategy that would deliver a seamless, intuitive navigational experience, helping to create a precinct that the community can both navigate with ease and feel proud of.
The wayfinding scope spanned a range of interventions, including a placemaking feature wall and skylight frit, multiple wayfinding systems, and city centre mapping. Each element was designed to create intuitive navigational cues, building a distinct precinct character and ensuring strong connectivity across the site.
The civic concept establishes a unique visual identity for Nicholas Street Precinct. Juxtaposed materials and forms reference both place and heritage. Interlocking layers symbolise the unity of the community, while bronze accents and perforations reflect architectural finishes. A dark layer evokes the coal seams of Ipswich’s past, and a tessellated pattern – drawn from the site’s paving – flows throughout, embedding the design in the local context.
Project Innovation/Need
Across the precinct, the wayfinding system is closely integrated with the site’s paving, with forms that appear to extrude from the ground plane, establishing a strong visual and spatial connection to the built environment. This design language continues through the retail and car park interfaces, creating a cohesive and intuitive user experience.
To support precinct activation, the system was designed to connect with key event spaces, offering opportunities for dynamic, engaging promotional content that enhances the overall visitor journey.
In celebration of the entertainment venue, we adopted a design language deeply informed by its architectural character. Drawing inspiration from the building’s modern interpretation of a now-demolished but much-loved 20th-century Art Deco former Ritz Theatre, the wayfinding system, skylight frit, and feature wall all reflect this stylistic foundation. These architectural cues help reinforce the venue’s identity and contribute to a distinctive sense of place within the precinct.
The wayfinding and placemaking features a geometric framework with custom graphics that wraps columns, spans walkways and adorns walls, creating a seamless blend of functionality and design. The feature wall was prefabricated in small, modular sections to enable precise off-site construction and streamlined on-site installation. This method not only ensured accuracy but also resulted in a striking wall treatment that seamlessly extends the building’s architectural narrative.
Design Challenge
A core design challenge was how to establish a meaningful sense of place that resonated with the local community. Research indicated that many locals were unfamiliar with Nicholas Street Precinct, and that the area lacked a cohesive identity – characterised by varying architectural styles and limited public awareness of recent upgrades and offerings.
Access also posed issues. One-way streets and poorly defined pedestrian and vehicular routes created confusion, contributing to disorientation and reducing repeat visitation.
In response, our goal was to foster a strong sense of place and provide clear, intuitive navigation throughout the precinct. Through an authentic design approach grounded in community relevance, we sought to position Nicholas Street Precinct as a safe, welcoming, and memorable destination. By integrating wayfinding with placemaking strategies, we aimed to establish a coherent precinct-wide navigational experience – one that not only improves legibility and flow but also strengthens the precinct’s overall identity and connection to the Ipswich community.
Sustainability
Signage was designed with durability and sustainability in mind. Sign faces feature district-based directional content that remains relevant over time, with the flexibility for precinct maps to be reskinned as the precinct evolves, eliminating the need to replace entire panels and reducing long-term environmental impact.
Constructed primarily from aluminium – one of the most recyclable and widely available local materials – the signs were manufactured in Queensland to minimise supply chain distances and associated emissions.
The feature wall was thoughtfully designed as a modular system, ensuring precise installation while allowing individual panels to be easily replaced over time, responding to wear and tear and significantly reducing future waste.
Integrated seamlessly into the civic spaces, the wayfinding system supports walkability and encourages active transport, reinforcing the precinct’s vision of a connected, pedestrian-friendly urban environment.
Wayfinding
This award celebrates creative and innovative design in the ways people orient themselves in physical space, and navigate from place to place. Consideration given to signage and other graphic communication, clues in the building's spatial grammar, logical space planning, audible communication, tactile elements and provision for special-needs users.
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