Office Signage: Reception, Wayfinding and What the Law Requires

ByBlogs Aquawave Web Designs

Most offices buy signage twice. Once for the reception wall, because that is the bit visitors photograph, and again eighteen months later when an inspector or a landlord asks where the fire equipment markers are. The brand signs get a budget and a designer. The signs that are actually required by law get an afternoon at the last minute. Here is what office signage covers, which safety signs a South African workplace genuinely needs, and how to check your building in a single walk.


Office signage directing visitors along a corridor with wayfinding arrows

What does office signage mean?

Office signage is every printed, cut or fabricated sign inside and on a workplace, and it does three separate jobs: brand, wayfinding and compliance. Most offices only budget for the first one.

Brand signage is the reception piece. Three dimensional cut lettering on the lobby wall, a logo panel behind the front desk, a frosted vinyl strip on the glass boardroom. It is the sign that tells a visitor they are in the right building and that the company takes itself seriously.

Wayfinding signage moves people. Floor directories in the lift lobby, door signs, meeting room plates, department markers, numbered parking bays. Nobody compliments good wayfinding. They only notice the absence of it, usually while wandering the third floor looking for a boardroom.

Compliance signage is the set required by law. Emergency exit routes, fire equipment locations, first aid, no smoking, assembly point. This is the category that gets forgotten, and it’s the only one of the three that carries a legal duty.

Worth knowing: these three often get ordered from three different suppliers at three different times, which is why so many offices end up with a beautiful reception wall and a laminated A4 page stuck to a fire door. Ordering them as one job keeps the finishes, colours and typefaces consistent across the building.

What safety signs does an office need?

Workplace safety signage in South Africa falls under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993, and the signs themselves are standardised by SANS 1186, specifically SANS 1186-1:2015, “Symbolic safety signs”. That standard defines five categories of symbolic safety sign, not four.

This matters more than it sounds. Search for the categories of safety signs and most of the answers that come back are written for British or American workplaces, and they give four categories. South Africa’s standard splits fire equipment signs out on their own. The five are:

  • Prohibition signs. Round, white background, red circular band and diagonal bar, black symbol. No smoking is the one everybody knows.
  • Warning signs. Triangular, yellow background, black border and symbol. Electric shock risk, slippery floor.
  • Mandatory signs. Round, blue background, white symbol. These instruct: protective equipment must be worn.
  • Safe condition signs. Square, green background, white symbol. Escape routes, first aid, emergency equipment.
  • Fire equipment signs. Square or rectangular, white background, red border, red pictogram. Extinguisher and hose reel locations.

If your fire extinguisher marker is green, it’s the wrong category. Green is safe condition. Fire equipment is red on white.

Now the part people get wrong in the other direction. There is no fixed statutory list of “the nine signs every office must display” in South African law, whatever a foreign checklist tells you. The required set follows from the employer’s own risk assessment under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. You identify the hazards in your building, then you sign them. A call centre on a first floor and a workshop with a compressor do not need the same signs.

That said, a typical office risk assessment lands on much the same short list nearly every time:

  • Emergency exit routes and the doors themselves
  • Fire extinguisher and hose reel location markers
  • First aid station
  • No smoking
  • Assembly point, outside the building

Whatever the set, the same practical requirements apply to all of it. Signs must be visible and unobstructed, securely fixed, legible at the distance people read them from, properly illuminated, and inspected as a matter of routine. A correct sign behind a filing cabinet is not a sign. Inspectors from the Department of Employment and Labour can enter a workplace without notice, and obstructed or missing signage is one of the easier things for them to spot.

If you’re replacing safety signage, insist on material printed to the SANS 1186 colours and symbols rather than a designer’s interpretation of them. We cover the full range on our signage page, and you can send us a list of what your building needs if you’d rather not specify it sign by sign.

How to audit your office signage in one walk

You can audit a standard office floor in about twenty minutes with a phone camera and no specialist knowledge. Walk it in the order a stranger would.

Start outside. Can a first-time visitor find your building from the street and identify your suite from the parking? If the complex directory still lists the company that moved out in 2023, that’s your first job.

Stand at reception and look up. Is the company name legible from where a visitor stops walking? Check the finish honestly. Lifting vinyl edges, sun-faded colour on a north-facing window graphic and a logo panel with a chipped corner all say something you did not intend to say.

Walk the visitor route. From the front door to the boardroom, then to the toilets. Count the decision points, the places someone has to choose a direction. Every decision point needs a sign. Most offices have a directory at the entrance and then nothing at all until the destination door.

Find the fire equipment without looking for it. Stand in the middle of the floor and see if you can spot an extinguisher marker from where you are. If you have to hunt for the extinguisher itself, the marker has failed. Check the colour while you’re there: white board, red border, red symbol.

Check every exit. Each exit door and the route to it needs a green safe condition sign, visible from a distance, not blocked by a coat rack or a stack of boxes. Photograph anything obstructed.

Finish at the assembly point. It is outside, so it gets ignored, and it weathers fastest. Faded assembly point boards are the single most common finding on an office signage walk.

Photograph every failure as you go. That photo list becomes the brief, and it’s a far better brief than a description written from memory at your desk.

Not sure what your building is missing?
Send us your floor photos or a plan and we will spec the full set, brand and safety, in one quote.
Get my office signage quote

Reception and wayfinding signs that hold up

Indoor office signage fails in three predictable ways: the fixing gives up, the finish yellows, or the information goes out of date. Choosing for the interior rather than the brochure fixes the first two.

For reception and logo walls, cut acrylic or brushed aluminium letters mounted on standoff pins carry the most weight visually. The standoffs lift the letters off the wall, the shadow does the work, and the result photographs well under office lighting. Flush-mounted vinyl is cheaper and reads flat, which is fine for a secondary wall and slightly disappointing behind a front desk.

For door and meeting room signs, the useful question is how often the name changes. Rooms get renamed, teams move floors, and a permanently engraved plate for a room called “Sales 2” is a small bet that the sales team never restructures. Slide-in frames with a printed insert cost more upfront and less every time something changes.

Directories and department markers live or die on legibility. Sans serif type, strong contrast, and mounted at eye height rather than above a door frame where nobody looks. Matt or satin finishes beat gloss in an office, because gloss catches the ceiling lights and turns half your directory into a mirror.

Glass gets its own note. Frosted or etched vinyl on a glass partition does two jobs at once, brand and visual safety, so people stop walking into it. A manifestation strip at roughly eye level is standard practice in commercial interiors, and it’s cheap to add while the rest of the signage is being installed.

Material choice for exterior building signs is a different conversation, driven by sun and weather rather than lighting and traffic. We work through the outdoor options in detail on the Total Print signage page, so this article won’t duplicate it. For anything that needs a printed panel at scale, large format printing in Johannesburg covers the production side.

Frequently asked questions

What does office signage cost?

Cost is driven by four things: the material, the size, the fabrication method and the installation. A printed acrylic door plate and a set of 3D cut aluminium letters for a reception wall are different jobs by an order of magnitude, so a single figure would mislead you. Compliance signage is usually the cheapest line on an office signage quote, because the signs are standardised, small format and printed in sets. Send us your sign list or floor photos and we will quote within 24 hours.

Are employers legally required to display safety signs in South Africa?

Yes. The duty sits with the employer under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993, which requires a workplace that is safe as far as is reasonably practicable, and the signs used must follow the SANS 1186 symbols and colours. The specific signs you need come out of your risk assessment rather than a fixed national list.

Can we print our own safety signs in company colours?

No. Safety signage is standardised for a reason, and the colour and shape are the message. A brand-coloured “emergency exit” sign is not a safe condition sign, it’s decoration, and a visitor under pressure reads shape and colour before they read words. Keep the brand palette for reception and wayfinding, and keep safety signage to the standard.

Signage sorted in one order
Reception, wayfinding and SANS-standard safety signs, printed and installed together.
Price my office signage