Couch-Potato Design
If you are to put up a sign, it should be a given to first and foremost check the location and take a good look at the local conditions. In this example it is pretty clear, that whoever made this sign did it exclusively sitting in front of his/her computer screen. So every day I climb these stairs I see people bumping into each other, and it’s all the designer’s fault…
While it is perfectly correct if you interpret this sign as instructions to go upstairs for the change to JR railways, you might also wrongly assume that it’s not only perfectly alright to use the rightmost passage, but it also appears that you are asked to do so.
If you take a closer look at the steps, however, you’ll find that the rightmost narrow passage is actually meant to be used by the people descending the stairs and you are not supposed to walk there at all.
So let’s have a look at where this sign is failing to convey the message. And what could be done to make it a bit more clear.
The left half of the sign is actually one unit and all it says is “if you either want to go to the exit (出口) or the Tôzai subway line (東西線), don’t climb the stairs, but walk around them to the end of the track”. For this information it is wasting far too much space. I think it is also problematic that the three elements (arrow, exit info and Tôzai-line info) visually divide the left half of the sign into three sub-parts, since it is really supposed to be one block of information. Furthermore that information takes half the width of the stair to convey its message.
My quick fix
So, my quick and nasty solution that I came up with walking past this sign was to forget about up/down/straight on etc., but to simply indicate that people are not supposed to climb the right side of the stair, also move the arrow left to the part of the stair where people are supposed to climb it, and then move the whole block for the Tôzai-line and exit into one compact unit closer to the edge. Finally I made the vertical lines thicker in order to more clearly separate blocks of information that do not belong together.
One might argue that underlaying different background colours and avoiding lines1 altogether might be clearer, but I didn’t really feel like doing major Photoshop retouching work on this, so please forgive the sloppy Photoshop job—I put this together in a few minutes, just to illustrate the principle.
1 Lines are always a compromise. For the little clarity they bring they also introduce a lot of visual “noise” that clutter the design.
posted on:
Jan 16, 2010 @ 06:49
filed under:
design & typography, english
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comments
Confusion should definitely be avoided in design… that’s the whole point of design and art as well – COMMUNICATION. Good work on your end! Terrible work on the original’s designer’s though.