Signage & Graphics

The environmental graphic design elective — how a designer plans, designs and builds the sign system that lets strangers read a building. It goes deeper than the wayfinding unit of the design studio, into the craft of the sign itself, and it is honest about the ways signage fails. Its first move is to name signage as a real discipline: environmental graphic design, the field of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, planned as a signage master plan and not a set of name-boards stuck on at the end — and a system that supports a legible building, never one that rescues a confusing plan, the wayfinding lesson carried forward. It teaches the information content system honestly, insisting that the commonest failure is too much information, and that good signage gives the right information at the right decision point, in a clear hierarchy of identification, direction, information and regulation, revealed progressively rather than dumped at the entrance. It draws the line between legibility, whether you can make out the letters, and readability, whether you can comprehend the message, and shows both to be measurable: legibility needs a clear, open typeface, because a sans-serif reads better at distance than a decorative one; it needs adequate size for the viewing distance, by the rule of thumb of about one inch, or twenty-five millimetres, of capital-letter height for every three metres of viewing distance; and above all it needs high tonal contrast, because colour alone fails a colour-blind or low-vision reader. It treats pictograms as powerful but only when standard, using the AIGA and Department of Transportation symbol set, the fifty public-information pictograms first published in 1974, and the ISO 7001 registered public information symbols, because an invented or ambiguous icon confuses more than it helps, which matters especially in multilingual India. It builds the hardware system with the same honesty: a sign is placed at eye level to be read and overhead to be seen at distance, sized for its viewing distance, made of a material and finish suited to its place, with a non-glare surface, and illuminated only where it earns it, because more light and more electronics are not automatically better and a dead or dazzling screen is worse than a printed sign. It insists that accessible signage is not optional, with raised tactile characters and Braille, high contrast, a non-glare finish and a consistent, findable mounting height, the same inclusive-design duty as the rest of the programme. And it ends on signage design as a whole, the eye level, the type, the pictograms and arrows, the colour and contrast, the language and multi-script reality of India, the coding and room identification, all resolved into one consistent, hierarchical, legible, accessible system, designed together rather than assembled from one-off boards. Throughout, signage is treated as a designed system a stranger must be able to read at a glance, and the ways it is bungled are named plainly.