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Went to a fancy new museum downtown and their exit signs were totally invisible to me
I visited the Modern Art Museum last Saturday with my buddy who's not color blind. He pointed out these cool colored exit signs they had, but I just saw gray blobs on the wall. Turns out they used red and green text on a dark background, which apparently looks identical to me. I asked the front desk if they had any backup signs with symbols or patterns, and the guy just shrugged at me. Has anyone else run into this kind of thing at public buildings where the designer went for looks over practicality?
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lucaslane2d ago
I actually read an article a few months back about how over 300 million people worldwide have some form of color vision deficiency and most public buildings totally ignore it when picking signage colors. The red-green thing is the most common type too, affects like 1 in 12 guys. It's wild that a brand new place wouldn't have at least some contrast or symbols, feels like they just copied whatever trendy sign shop they found on Instagram.
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grant_torres2d ago
lucaslane nailed it with that 1 in 12 guys stat, it's way more common than people realize. The annoying part is that fixing this is usually super easy too, like adding a white border around the sign or using shapes instead of just colors. Most fire codes already require exit signs to have specific symbols or patterns for this exact reason, so it's kind of wild that the museum ignored all that. Probably some trendy designer who thought red and green looked "minimalist" and nobody in charge stopped to ask if anyone would actually be able to see it in an emergency.
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