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?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_blake3mo 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.

mitchell.shane3mo 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?

-1

anthony1651mo 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.