Mark Boulton

I’ve got a con­fes­sion to make: i’ve got a thing about sig­nage design. On any given day trip, excur­sion, or hol­i­day, and I can be seen ignor­ing the attrac­tion and tak­ing pho­to­graphs, or even draw­ing little sketches, of the sig­nage. I’m par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in air­port signage. 

A few days ago, I took a busi­ness trip to Brus­sels, via Amsterdam’s Schiphol air­port. I’ve wanted to visit Schiphol ever since I atten­ded a lec­ture in 2005 by the designer of the sig­nage sys­tem, Paul Mijk­sen­aar. As a designer, you know when you get those moments where some­thing some­body says turns you’re entire under­stand­ing on its head? See­ing Paul talk, I prob­ably had one of those moments every minute.

Schiphol vs Cardiff

Cardiff Inter­na­tional Air­port has, without doubt, some of the worst sig­nage I think I’ve seen. I’m not sure what con­straints (or lack thereof) where placed on the design­ers in order to pro­duce these. I mean, white Arial on blue loz­enges? All the same, regard­less of con­tent. Hon­estly, it makes for a nav­ig­a­tion nightmare.

Cardiff Inter­na­tional Air­port sig­nage (left) com­pared to Ams­ter­dam Schiphol air­port (right). More pho­to­graphs of these are on Flickr.

Thank good­ness Cardiff is not often used for trans­fer­ring flights, like some of the major hubs through­out the world. Case in point, on Tues­day, in Schiphol Air­port, I had 25 minutes to: 

• Take a leak
• Change Ter­min­als
• Xray my hand lug­gage again
• Find some water to buy

I was run­ning in-between each of these tasks to make sure I didn’t miss my flight to Brus­sels. Without clear sig­nage, in the place I expec­ted them, I would have missed my flight for sure, and may have wet myself along the way.

Schiphol has some of the clearest sig­nage I have seen in any air­port (in fact, its sig­nage sys­tem has been copied by sev­eral air­ports, Lon­don Heath­row included). It is designed around some extremely simple rules (Paul explained some of these in his talk a while ago), the three that stood out for me were: 

• Con­spicu­ity
• Con­trast
• Task

Con­spicu­ity is obvi­ous. Make the sig­nage stand out. They should com­pete with other things; archi­tec­ture, or advert­ising. They should be high con­trast. Most of all, they should help users com­plete their task. Paul men­tioned three things that people want to do when they arrive at an air­port (and this holds so true) 

• Go to the bathroom
• Find my gate
• Get out of the airport

On arriv­ing in Cardiff on Wed­nes­day even­ing, it took me a good ten minutes to find the bath­room. Ten minutes! This was because the toi­let sig­nage was ingeni­ously attached to a wall facing away from the pre­vail­ing traffic through the bag­gage reclaim hall. A genius bit of way­find­ing that is.

Par­al­lels with web design

It’s not dif­fi­cult to draw par­al­lels with air­port sig­nage (in fact, most way­find­ing sys­tems) and web­site design. Good sig­nage should enhance a user exper­i­ence, it should help a user com­plete their task, and it should do it in a way that is unobtrusive.

Over on Paul’s web­site, he has some fant­astic gems of design advice. These are writ­ten in a con­text of design­ing way­find­ing sys­tems, but they could also be applied to a mul­ti­tude of other media: 

Col­our Coding

Should rein­force a cat­egory of inform­a­tion that is equally clear without col­our coding.

A no brainer this one, but it’s amaz­ing how often colour-coding is abused.

Jar­gon

Assume that all vis­it­ors know noth­ing about the air­port. Select ter­min­o­logy geared to users rather than con­coct­ing clever air­port gibberish.

To be hon­est, I’ve not vis­ited an air­port where they’ve used their own jar­gon. Of course, there are cul­tural dif­fer­ences. For example, I’m sure I’ve seen a sign for ‘Bath­room’ in a US Air­port. As a Brit­ish bloke I’m sure this would make it dif­fi­cult to find if I was in the muddled state of badly need­ing a pee.

Maps

The num­ber of pas­sen­gers cap­able of read­ing (and cor­rectly inter­pret­ing) a map is neg­li­gible. By and large, maps are dis­play win­dows for the present­a­tion of air­port facil­it­ies and not sub­sti­tutes for signposting.

I hate maps. Hate them. Why is it, in any attraction/shopping centre/airport, the design­ers of maps see it as a cre­at­ive exer­cise? I’ve lost count of the amount beau­ti­ful iso­met­ric maps that are com­pletely useless. 

Fonts

Only graphic design­ers show interest in fonts. Do not use more than one font and, unless you have plenty of time and money, stick to Fru­ti­ger, Clear­view, Gill or Meta

This one made me chuckle, but he’s got a very good point. Take Cardiff for example. Arial? Why? Why not use Clear­view, or Fru­ti­ger. Why use a font that is an inferior knock-off of Hel­vetica that is less legible as a sig­nage typeface? Licens­ing? Probably. 

Illu­min­ated signs

Don’t save money on light­ing. All primary signs require built-in light­ing. The sun­nier the cli­mate and the more day­light avail­able, the big­ger the need for illu­min­ated signs.

I don’t think any of the signs in Cardiff air­port where illu­min­ated (although I may be wrong on that).

Pic­to­grams

Don’t expect too much of pic­to­grams. Always add text to less gen­er­ally known functions.

This is another little beauty and can be applied to web design with regards to icons. Don’t expect too much from them. 

Put it to the test

Test all ideas that devi­ate from the stand­ard solution.

This must be the num­ber one recom­mend­a­tion for sig­nage, but note the clos­ing words. But, that said, test­ing stand­ard solu­tions can always solid­ify think­ing and may throw up the odd surprise. 

Some wise little nug­gets of design advice. 

There are more pho­to­graphs of air­port sig­nage, good and bad, on the aptly named Air­port Sig­nage, Air­port Signs and Pic­to­grams, and Sig­nage Sys­tems Flickr groups.