Pictograms are among mankind’s earliest inventions. From the cave paintings at Lascaux and Egyptian hieroglyphics to the pictograms found throughout modern international airports, humans have been conveying ideas through images for thousands of years.

Good pictograms are literal and easy to understand regardless of language or cultural barriers. They convey a single idea. They can be understood on a subconscious level in the blink of an eye. Pictograms are an important aspect of most interior signage solutions and they are crucial to effective ADA signage.

Unfortunately, not all pictograms work as well as they should. To help you avoid choosing or using bad pictograms in your corporate signage design, here is a list of a few pictogram pitfalls:

Stick figures. If it looks like a 5-year-old did it, it isn’t right for your organization – unless you sell pretzel sticks or pipe cleaners. Pictograms need to be recognizable, but not so stylized that they bring undue attention to themselves.

Multiple ideas. A pictogram needs to represent one thing clearly. Trying to cram multiple pieces into a single pictogram is a recipe for confusion.

Lack of context. The pictogram above isn’t bad. In fact, it’s part of an award-winning set produced through collaboration between AIGA, the professional organization for design, and the U.S. Department of Transportation for use in airports and other transportation hubs. The issue here is what may make sense in the context of an airport setting may not make sense elsewhere. (For the record, the pictogram signifies “arriving flights.”)

1. Stylized arrows. If you use wayfinding signage to point someone in a given direction, make sure they know they are looking at an arrow.
2. Smiley faces. The largest retailer in America can get away with them; you can’t.
3. Rainbow colors. Color is important. Color is good. Too much color is a mess. Pictograms should be one color.
4. Remember, not all pictograms are created equal, so choose wisely when using them to enhance your ada signage.

Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB) is a 397-bed comprehensive center for pediatric health care. As one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States, CHB offers a complete range of health care services for children from birth through 21 years of age. Children’s Hospital Boston is also a teaching facility for Harvard Medical School. The Children’s Hospital Boston is a conglomeration of a half-dozen buildings ranging in age from 90 years to one year. As with many New England hospitals, CHB has added new wings and expanded its facility over time, which often causes confusing pathways for staff and patients to navigate in order to access hospital services. In 2003 CHB began an expansion and reorganization project at its multiple-building main campus – a project that will continue into 2008. CHB needed a signage system that would improve navigation, withstand the high-traffic hospital environment, and allow staff to easily update messaging and directional information to keep pace with short-term renovation projects as well as long-term staffing and department changes. CHB also wanted to brand the different hospital buildings and create logical pathways.

About the Solution

ASI partnered with Children’s Hospital Boston to fabricate and install the interior signage system for this complex 5-year, multi-phase, multi-location project. Two Twelve Associates of New York designed the signage system and provided wayfinding by assigning each building with a unique color and symbol. They chose ASI’s Infinity™ system for its perforated chassis and pin-registered face panels as well as its longterm durability. Infinity provided the perfect solution, incorporating the multiple color schemes with the changeable face components that allow the hospital to easily reassign department names as they renovate and relocate staff throughout the buildings.

Because of the vast array of services and departments housed at the hospital, nearly one hundred sign types were developed to meet the hospital’s diverse wayfinding and messaging needs. ASI furnished more than 15,000 signs for this project, which includes several suburban satellite hospitals acquired by CHB since the inception of the project. To help handle the large volume of data required to manage the project, ASI developed a system to allow the client to enter signs into a preformatted message schedule to ensure that the first sign produced would match in color and quality any of thousands of signs produced over the five-year span. The system also enabled ASI to easily meet the six-week lead times throughout the various phases of the project.

See more photos and download a PDF of this project by clicking here.

Check out this Blog Post on the Green Resource Guide about Children’s Hospital Boston Donor Recogintion Signage using 3form’s Ithemba material.

Ithemba features a copper and beaded pattern produced by HIV-impacted African women, giving them a source of income, and means “hope” in the Xosi language. The donor elements also incorporate tempered-glass panels that are updated annually and reinstalled.

We’ve talked a lot about how a good, effective wayfinding system does not equate to having an abundance of architectural signage — whether it be interior signage or exterior signage. More often than not, having too much signage can have the exact opposite effect: people become more disoriented, not less. People move on without registering any of the signage and either stumble upon their intended destination or, just as likely, simply give up.

A lack of signage, however, can be equally devastating. That’s what makes the science of wayfinding such a complex field of study, involving not only an understanding of spatial relations but also human psychology. Well-trained wayfinding designers know that in order for someone to go smoothly from Point A to Point B, they must not only know what signs to install but also where, how and, just as important, why. Wayfinding is a problem-solving process, after all, with a number of decision points along the route at which people need appropriate “information support systems” in order to make the right decision that will propel them to their intended target. If the environment lacks these crucial elements, people again experience disorientation, confusion and frustration. 

A friend of mine told me of one wayfinding catastrophe due to a lack of signage that she experienced when she lived in rural Japan in the mid-1990s. A Japanese colleague who had invited her to dinner with his family one evening helpfully gave her a detailed, hand-drawn map to his home, complete with landmarks written in English. My friend set off on her bicycle from her apartment a full hour before she was to meet her co-worker, just in case she got lost.

Which, of course, she promptly did. You see, with rare exceptions – mostly in larger cities such as Kyoto – Japan does not use street names and therefore have few street signs, either for cartographic purposes or even directional purposes. Instead, Japanese addresses usually indicate the names of blocks, districts, and building numbers; they may also include the names and numbers of wards and even towns. Thus, when giving directions in Japan, people ordinarily provide maps dotted with specific landmarks such as subway stations and cross streets.
In theory, my friend understood the fact that her colleague’s home would not be found the usual Western way, i.e., finding the right street, then counting down the house numbers until you get to your destination. In practice, however, the Japanese method of wayfinding so confused her that she had to stop and ask several people on the street to help her interpret the map. To make things worse, she’d only been in the country for a few days and neither spoke nor read Japanese, so hand signals and body language interpretation were definitely in order.

At last, a helpful farmer took pity on her and guided her around the warren of tiny streets for at least fifteen minutes. Fortunately, my friend remembered the type of car her co-worker drove, so when she saw it parked in front of a house in the middle of a quiet, nondescript street, she nearly cried in relief. It had taken her almost exactly an hour to find it. The irony: As she later realized once she got to know the neighborhood better, the house was actually just a ten-minute walk from her apartment.

Now, this may surprise folks who think of Japan as being at the forefront of the digital signage revolution. You only need look at a photograph of the dynamic, almost futuristic Shinjuku area of Tokyo to know that Japan is a country that certainly doesn’t lack the technology or experience to employ digital signage. Wayfinding, however, is apparently not its primary purpose, at least for them.
 
I’d love to hear from you guys about “wayfinding fails” in your own life. Feel free to share in the comments section below!