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At the new city hall building, their wayfinding signs are a real problem
I was there yesterday trying to find the permit office. The signs use only red and green arrows on a gray background to show you where to go. I'm red-green colorblind, so to me it just looked like a bunch of gray arrows pointing in different directions. I had to ask three people for help before I found the right floor. It seems like such a simple fix to add a shape or some text next to the colors. Has anyone else run into this kind of thing in public buildings lately?
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the_blake6mo ago
Gotta disagree a bit here. Overloading signs with text can make them just as confusing, especially in a busy place. Sometimes a clear color system is faster for most people to follow at a glance. The real issue is using only color without a backup, like you said with shapes. But adding full words to every arrow can create visual clutter that slows everyone down.
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mitchell.shane6mo ago
Man that "bunch of gray arrows" thing is so real. I had the exact same problem at the big hospital downtown last month. Their floor signs were just blue and purple squares, no words. I stood there like an idiot for ten minutes trying to figure out if imaging was a blue square or a purple one. It's 2024, how hard is it to just write the dang words on the sign?
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anthony1654mo ago
And then you get some designer who thinks abstract shapes are the future and forgets some of us just need to find the dang X-ray room before we pee our pants. Buddy of mine got lost in a new office tower that used animals as floor markers. Penguin for floor 3, flamingo for floor 5, but they all looked like blobs from a distance. He ended up in a conference room full of accountants trying to pitch a new software. They thought he was a client. He had to sit through twenty minutes of slides about cloud storage before he could slip out. Made him real careful about trusting "creative" wayfinding after that.
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