All week we’ve been spotting signs.
We’ve taken a close look at stick figures, warning signs, seductive signs and traffic signs. And you must have realised by now how much of our life is ‘signposted’.
Signs have become integrated in our urban landscape - it would look very strange without them (one of today’s creative assignments is built around this).
The discipline that helps people navigate indoor and outdoor environments like city centres or train stations is called wayfinding. And it’s incredibly hard to get right.
If you’re a frequent traveller like me you’re probably familiar with desperately looking for a sign in an unfamiliar airport or train station. Upon arriving in Tokyo I spent half an hour desperately looking for the right subway, lugging a large suitcase around. In the end I was helped by one of the pensioners-volunteer stationed there to help lost tourists like me.
Good wayfinding saves a lot of time and hassle and I hope this week has, if anything, made your more appreciative of all the effort that goes into designing and creating consistent signage that helps you stay safe, find your way, and - fair enough - spend a ton of money.
Below are a couple of suggestions to creatively play with signs and wayfinding this weekend.
Imagine an alien as arrived to your house and is staying for a week. It doesn’t speak your language, but does understand visual cues. What signs would you need to design to help it find its way around?
You could go on your own ‘signs’ treasure hunt (this is also a lot of fun to do with kids). Go for a walk in an urban environment and look for arrow signs. Whenever you’ve found one, take a picture of it for your collection, and then take the direction it tells you to go (do bring a map just in case). When there are arrows pointing in different directions toss a coin or just pick the most fun looking direction. If you like, you can keep track of your walk in an app like Runkeeper, so that you’ll end up with a very funny-looking drawing on the map.
Design a sign! We have signs for many things, but what sign do you feel is missing? Smog-free routes? A warning sign telling people that if they try to jump the queue they’ll have to start queueing all over again? Think about where you have friction as you go about your life. What irritates or vexes you is always a great place to start. Then ask yourself: could this be fixed by a sign? And design it! Draw it, paint it, design it digitally. It doesn’t have to be perfect - we just need to get the idea.
If you want to take more photographs, again, arrows can be a great visual element to play with this weekend. Direction is in important compositional element, and arrows are your instant directional fix! Look for arrow signs and see if you can take your picture in a way that will make hem point to something beautiful, quaint, interesting, ridiculous, etc.
If it’s a rainy day, and you like using photo editing programmes, you could take a picture of an urban environment, a busy city centre for example, and start erasing all signage. It can be very interesting to see what you are left with.
And of course you can always catch up on any assignments you missed out on earlier this week.
Do share your weekend projects around signs on Twitter or Instagram, using the hashtag #kramerseye, I can’t wait to see them!