I’m the Operations Director at Great Escape Music Festival Australia, and for years, signage was one of the biggest pain points in my department.
At first glance, signage seems simple. Put up a few arrows, label some areas, direct people where they need to go. Easy.
But once an event starts scaling, signage becomes a surprisingly operationally complex task.
At Great Escape, we now put up hundreds of signs across site every year. Patron wayfinding, artist compounds, backstage access, camping areas, vehicle routes, bars, toilets, emergency exits, staff-only zones, vendor access, accreditation, parking, traffic flow, and safety messaging all rely on signage being correct.
And when signage is wrong, the flow-on effects can be massive.
Patrons get lost. Vehicles end up in the wrong places. Artists arrive at incorrect entry points. Radio traffic increases because staff are constantly answering directional questions. Queues build in the wrong locations. Emergency access becomes harder to manage.
Like with most of the Operations Department, good signage is almost invisible. People only notice it when it fails.
In The Early Years, Signage Lived Entirely In My Head
In the early years of Great Escape, I had no real system for signage.
As the event grew, I started trying to create some structure around it. I would build rough signage plans in Photoshop, placing dots around the site map with little images of the signs next to them. It was better than nothing, but it still relied heavily on me physically walking around site with the signage team explaining exactly where everything needed to go.
And even then, things still regularly went wrong.
Signs would face the wrong direction. Volunteers would place signs in slightly incorrect locations. Important directional signage would be missed entirely. Temporary signs would get moved by vehicles or weather and nobody would notice.
The biggest issue was that all the operational knowledge still lived entirely in my brain.
I knew:
- where signs needed to go
- which direction they should face
- what they should look like
- and all the little nuances about placement that aren’t obvious from a static map
But I had no good way to transfer that knowledge to a team in a way that allowed them to work independently and confidently.
So instead, I became the bottleneck.
For years, signage setup would consume around a day and a half of bump-in for me personally. As the head of a department, I would spend entire days driving around site directing volunteers and contractors where signs needed to go.
The worst part was that I was constantly being pulled away to deal with other operational issues. A contractor needed a decision. A radio call came through. An artist transport issue popped up. A permit question needed answering.
Meanwhile, the signage team would often be left standing around waiting for me to become available again so they could continue.
It was inefficient, frustrating, and completely unscalable.
The Real Problem Wasn’t The Signs – It Was Communication
Over time, I realised the actual problem wasn’t signage itself.
The problem was operational communication.
We had no system that properly connected:
- signage inventory
- mapping
- placement instructions
- installation progress
- and most importantly, on-ground execution
The more complex the event became, the more obvious the gap became.
At large events, signage is not just a design task. It is an operational workflow.
You need to know:
- how many signs exist
- whether they’ve been ordered
- whether they’ve been printed
- where they’re going
- who is placing them
- whether they’ve been installed
- and whether they’ve been collected after the event
And ideally, all of that information needs to be accessible in real time by the team actually doing the work onsite.
Building A Better Signage Workflow
The Signage Manager inside EventLab was born directly out of this exact problem.
We wanted a system that connected the entire signage workflow together instead of treating signage as disconnected spreadsheets, PDFs, screenshots, and radio calls.
Inside the platform, we can now:
- add signs into the Signage Manager
- upload the sign artwork/design
- track quantities
- assign sign sizes
- colour code signs by department or category
- track statuses like ordered, printed, or in stock
- and place signs directly onto the event map
One small but incredibly useful feature is being able to rotate the sign icon on the map to match the exact direction the sign should face onsite.
That sounds minor, but when you are placing directional arrows across a large site, orientation matters enormously.
We can also compare how many signs exist versus how many have been allocated onto the map, which helps quickly identify shortages or surplus stock before bump-in even begins.
Comments can also be attached to individual signs for specific installation instructions or notes about tricky placements.
But the biggest operational shift happened onsite.
The Biggest Change Was Mobile Execution
Last year at Great Escape, I spent around 15 minutes inducting our signage coordinator and volunteers on how to use the EventLab mobile app. I also taught them how to use a drill and a star picket driver.
That was essentially it.
The team could then walk around site independently with the mobile app in “signage workflow” mode and see:
- every sign location
- the sign artwork
- installation notes
- and live placement progress directly from their phones
One of the most important requirements for us was that the system needed to work offline. The Great Escape site has virtually zero phone reception across the site, so relying on mobile data simply was not an option.
The app allowed the team to continue working completely offline while moving around site, with any updates automatically syncing once they were back in service or connected to Wi-Fi again. That meant the workflow remained reliable even where reception was non-existent.
As signs were installed, they could mark them as “placed”. The sign icons would then become semi-transparent on the map, making it visually obvious which signs were complete and which still needed to be installed.
The team could also upload photos of completed signs directly from site so supervisors could verify placement and sign off remotely without physically driving around the entire festival.
For the first time ever, I was no longer required to personally supervise the entire signage installation process.
And the result honestly shocked me.
Out of 156 signs placed onsite, only 2 were installed incorrectly.
I didn’t receive a single question from the signage team all day.
The Unexpected Benefit Was Operational Freedom
The obvious benefit was signage accuracy.
But the bigger operational win was removing myself as the bottleneck.
Instead of spending a day and a half micromanaging signage placement, I was able to focus on higher-level operational priorities during bump-in.
At the same time, our signage staffing hours were reduced by roughly 50%.
Previously, volunteers and crew would regularly lose time waiting for me to become available so work could continue. Once the workflow became self-directed through the mobile app, that downtime almost completely disappeared.
The team could simply continue moving through the workflow independently.
That operational freedom is incredibly valuable during event bump-in, where every department is competing for time, attention, vehicles, radios, and decision-making capacity.
Good Event Operations Is About Transferring Knowledge Into Systems
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in live events is that operational problems often happen when critical knowledge only exists in one person’s head.
That might work at smaller events, but as operations scale, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
Good systems allow knowledge to become operationally accessible to everyone involved in execution.
For us, signage went from being a stressful, highly manual process heavily dependent on one person, to a scalable operational workflow that volunteers could confidently execute with minimal supervision.
And ultimately, that’s what good event operations is really about.
Not just creating plans, but building systems that allow teams to execute confidently, independently, and accurately under pressure.
