City installs new wayfinding signs in downtown

While cruising through downtown San Marcos, some may notice a new addition next to the street banners throughout the area. Pedestrian wayfinding signs were recently installed, made to be accessible for pedestrians.

“The head designer was Charlotte Wattigny in the Convention and Visitors Bureau. But we have a group of citizens and staff called the Downtown Design Task Force and this is one of the projects that that group has been working on,” said Josie Falletta, Downtown Manager for the City of San Marcos.

While the project had been in the works for a few years, it was temporarily paused due to the pandemic.

“We knew that we wanted wayfinding signage downtown,” Falletta said. “That’s something that we have in our parks and it’s something that we have seen in other cities that we aspire to have in downtown San Marcos.”

The signs also have a QR code feature that allows downtown pedestrians to view additional information.

“We live in a world of digital everything and so it would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t have some mechanism to direct visitors to our website, which is brand new,” Falletta said.

The master website is www.visitsanmarcos. com, the microsite can be found at www.downtownsmtx.com.

Above, the City of San Marcos recently installed new wayfinding signs in downtown. Photo courtesy of City of San Marcos

“It has business listings for all of our downtown businesses. It also has events, it has maps, it has descriptions of things you can do downtown,” Falletta said “There’s just so much unlimited information on the website if someone is looking for what to do, or see, or eat, or drink or any of those things.”

While the signs assist in navigating downtown, they also feature the San Marcos River.

“One of our challenges always has been, ‘how do we bridge that connection between downtown and our river visitors?’ So that is one of the reasons why we made sure to include the iconography of the river on the signage because we really want to bridge the gap between the two,” Falletta said.

The wayfinding signs also include the new logo as the Mermaid Capital of Texas.

“That was a new designation that we received last year, so we’re really excited to promote all of those new things,” Falletta said.