McDonald's turned its golden arches into wayfinding signs that point to the nearest store

McDonald's Canada's roadside wayfinding boards varied wildly and read as generic fast-food signage, failing to guide drivers or reinforce the brand.

Agency Cossette solved the design problem by cutting the golden arches logo into directional pieces. Each sign used the arches themselves as an arrow, with one short line of copy telling the driver what to do.

The boards told people McDonald's was 'On Your Left', 'On Your Right', at the 'Next Exit', or that they had 'Just Missed Us' — turning a tired signage medium into a single, unmistakable brand gesture.

Turn the logo itself into the directional sign

The arch is already a universally known shape, so it needs neither context nor explanation to be read as a direction.

Using the actual logo as the pointer erased the gap between brand and message, so the sign became both ad and instruction.

It was a near-zero-new-asset idea: the icon already existed, only its function changed.

Different pieces could be cut to point any way, so a single visual system covered many roadside situations.

Give one asset two jobs: if your symbol can point or measure or count, it becomes useful in the field and no longer needs a separate ad.

Follow the Arches won the Outdoor Grand Prix at the 2018 Cannes Lions and four international awards, and was folded into McDonald's global brand playbook as a case study in visual intelligence.