Not fade away

My photo flatters the legibility of this slowly fading message outside Barts Hospital in London.

Architects and signs

Sign designers sometimes complain that architects don't like signs cluttering up their beautiful buildings. As Edo Smitshuijzen reports in his recent book, Signage Design Manual, “They perceive signage as an assault on the aesthetics of their creation and as an insult to the self-evidence of their spatial design. A lot of them carry an almost sacred but entirely unfounded belief in the functionality of their ‘wordless’ buildings”.

Perhaps this is taking it a bit far, so, as preparation for a short article I'm writing on this, I thought I would see what coverage sign design and wayfinding gets in the RIBA bookshop.

There was one book on signs - Smitshuijzen's. And I can confirm that there was indeed a sign outside the building... just.

User ballistics

'User ballistics' is a term I sometimes find myself using to describe the movement of people around environments. It's important for the placement of signs, and suggests that, as well as a logical analysis of decision points and sight lines, you need to take account of users' initial trajectory, speed and momentum.

David Lewis and I came up with the term about ten years ago, when researching and advising on the placement of flight information displays in Gatwick Airport. Observing people entering the airport concourse from the train station, we found they came through in bursts (all having arrived on the same train) and were impelled into the room by the momentum of the crowd. Often they progressed 20 or 30 metres into the concourse before they had a chance to stop and look around. At this point they had missed the flight information screens, which were placed to be visible if you looked to the left just a few metres from the door.

As well as the push effect of the crowd, we also found distant features to have magnetic force. At this same point, a very large flight information wall was visible, but not legible. People would walk towards it, but stop at a certain point when the word 'Arrivals' became visible. Those wanting Departures would then turn and look for another direction.

Walk this way

Waiting to pay for a book in Foyles at St Pancras station the other day, I found myself queuing from the wrong direction. When the shop person finished dealing with the person in front, she then served someone else who just arrived from the other direction... as if I wasn't there.

I apparently misinterpreted the sign pictured here. I saw it as indicating the direction of travel of the queue, and as ushering me into the space just behind it. Its real intention was to point in the direction I should walk before turning around and queuing from the other side. I should add that the other side did have a notice saying 'queue from this side' but it wasn't visible to me.

Feeling stroppy, and wishing to embarrass my family as all good fathers and husbands should, I complained. The shop person just could not see the problem, because she knew which direction the queue was supposed to go. In effect, she made the case for user-testing. Just because we, having written and designed something, have no difficulty with it, does not mean someone else will react in the same way.

Happily for me, the next customer who arrived made the same 'mistake' as me. So of our sample of three customers, 66.6666% recurring interpreted the arrow as I did.

Out of sight

I'm on holiday in Seattle, and just visited Peter Miller Books - he has a great stock of design and architecture books from small publishers as well as large. I've been there before and I always discover something I haven't seen before.

It's a stimulating and attractive shop to browse in. But you quickly discover that many of the books are out of reach - and out of sight, given the propensity of typographers to use tiny type on design books. Some of the shelves are, at a guess, over 3 metres tall. They look great - with their varying heights, they give the effect of a city skyline.

Peter says he puts the good stuff he doesn't want finger marks on there - books you have to know about and ask for. But I'm not so sure. It's also notable that there are no signs or labels to show how the shop is organised, and I think this reflects something wayfinding designers quickly learn about architects: it's mostly about how it looks and feels, and they hate signs.

Star spotting in Laos

Cara Gerard (former IDU colleague, and wayfinding designer) sent me this nice lady from Luang Prabang, Laos. But she reminds me of someone.
As Private Eye puts it, could they by chance be related?

An early bath for heads up, or a heads up on early doors

What am I on about? Phrases which arrive through slips of the tongue, and stick around. Too many metaphors, I know, but stay with me a moment.

An example is 'early doors' which is generally assumed to have originated with football manager Ron Atkinson - famous for his expressive but sometimes mangled English (see this nice fanclub website on 'Ronglish'. It is used to mean 'early on' but no one knows where the doors bit comes in.

In our own information design world, we come across the term 'heads up mapping', which refers to maps that are oriented not with north at the top, as is conventional, but so the direction you are facing is at the top. In the research environment, I have seen this referred to as 'forward up', and this makes more sense to me. But because it is the way maps are shown on heads-up displays in aircraft cockpits, the term has slipped across to refer to map as well as the display.

Personally I am not convinced that forward up mapping works best for everyone. But more on this another time.