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Signage and wayfinding

Lesson 2 of 12 in Applications.

Why Wayfinding Matters · Planetizen

Lesson

The reference case for the whole discipline is Britain's road signs. Jock Kinneir en.wikipedia.org and Margaret Calvert en.wikipedia.org designed the system between 1957 and 1963, first for the Anderson Committee on motorways and then for the Worboys Committee en.wikipedia.org, formed in 1963 to review every other road. They drew a typeface for it, Transport en.wikipedia.org, and worked inside the 1949 Geneva protocol: triangles warn, circles command, rectangles inform.

One system reaching a shopfront, a phone, a van and a form, each needing a different amount of it.

A doodle map of a car approaching a road junction, with a triangle warning sign showing two children, a round sign with an arrow and a rectangular sign with three arrows placed just before the fork. — A driver nears a junction and meets three sign shapes where the choice is made: a triangle that warns, a circle that tells you what to do and a rectangle that informs.

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Question 1, locked
A hospital puts a sign every few metres along its corridors, including long stretches where there is nothing to decide. What does the surplus signage do to the signs that matter?
- It teaches people to stop reading signs, so the ones at real decision points get skipped too
- Nothing much, because a reader simply ignores the signs that are not relevant to them
- It slows people down, but the extra repetition makes the route easier to remember
- It weakens the identity, because the brand appears too often to feel considered
Question 2, locked
Which of these words means this? “Getting a stranger from where they are to where they are going. Signs are one instrument of it, not the whole of it.”
- Wayfinding
- Viewing distance
- Embroidery
- Pantone TCX
Question 3, locked
Which of these words means this? “Every place a person could go wrong. Signage belongs here and almost nowhere else.”
- Decision point
- Wrap
- Design system
- Component

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