Slate Articles Stories from Slate &quot;She Does a Better Job Than Map Quest!&quot; <p>Last month, I asked <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> readers to <a href="">send me their hand-drawn maps</a>. The request was part of <a href="">my series on signs</a>, the tools that professionals use to orient us and direct us from point A to point B. But official signs aren't the only things that help us get around. Since early man first drew on his cave wall—including marks that some scholars argue were maps of local rivers and settlements—we've been sketching out routes to guide one another to the market and to the mountain top.</p> <p>These humble maps can be beautiful. They can also be messy, indecipherable, inaccurate, and unattractive. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> readers sent in nearly 200 maps, and they ranged from hasty scribbles on scrap paper to elaborate, multicolored renderings. No matter what it looks like, a handmade map offers several advantages over a road atlas or the directions you get from Google. Read on to see some of your most interesting hand-drawn maps—and to discover why homemade maps are often superior to the ones designed by the pros.</p> <p>The crucial advantage of the handmade map is that it is designed for a particular person confronting a particular task. The map below, for example, was drawn for a reader named Marya by her grandmother. It depicts the back of her computer &quot;and how to connect it to things.&quot; Although Marya could probably have gathered the information conveyed here by consulting user manuals, she would have had to flip through pages of useless gobbledygook, some of it in Korean and Portuguese. This map offers only the details Marya needs. &quot;Every time I moved,&quot; Marya writes, &quot;I went back to this map to find my way from one apparatus to another.&quot;</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>A proper atlas must include every street name, not just the names of the streets you're looking for. By comparison, the map below—drawn by <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> reader Saral Kaushik to direct a friend to a club in Soho, London—edits ruthlessly. There's not much here, but the minimal amount of information makes for a map that's easier to use than one that's cluttered with detail. The small Saturn shape at right evokes the <a href="">London Underground roundel</a> and signifies a station; &quot;TCR&quot; stands for Tottenham Court Road, the name of the stop. Two relevant streets—Oxford, where the underground exits, and Greek, where the club is—are named. The others are unnamed, or left off entirely.</p> <p>Homemade maps also play with scale in fascinating ways. Paul Stiff, a professor of information design who's been collecting hand-drawn maps for decades, reviewed all the submitted maps for <em>Slate</em>, and he was intrigued by the one below, which was drawn by an Australian architect to direct his daughter from Brisbane to his farm. Stiff notes: &quot;If you compare this with a topographical map, you'll see that he's compressed the scale astonishingly.&quot; There's less detail closer to home, where roads are familiar, Stiff says, &quot;but the scale expands the nearer we get to the destination because we need more information in places that are new to us.&quot; Indeed, the distance from Brisbane, at the top of the map, to the Murwillumbah turnoff, depicted just below it, is more than 40 miles; the rest of the journey, which takes up most of the page, is only 20 miles or so.<strong></strong></p> <p>Alexander Calder used the same trick in 1949 when directing his friend Ben Shahn from New York City to the artist's home in Roxbury, Conn. Calder omits much of the journey, assuming that Shahn can find his way to the Merritt Parkway, where the map below begins. And Calder devotes almost one-third of this map to the final five miles of the trip, the part where Shahn must navigate unfamiliar local roads. The map, submitted to <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> by an archivist at the Smithsonian, is striking in part because it uses Calder's familiar bold lines and primary hues. But it also conveys information with elegant simplicity. Note how Calder uses arrows from the address stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the page: A blue one runs from the name of his road to his drawing of the road on the map; a yellow one runs from his own name to his home. The arrows eliminate additional labeling, Stiff notes, making the map more legible.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>You don't have to be an internationally renowned artist to draw a map that's more useful than a road atlas. Consider this map of Fort Wayne, Ind., submitted by reader Hollie Briggs. It was drawn hastily by her father-in-law—in pink crayon—to show the way from his home (the circle at the top of the map) back to the interstate. The map worked so well when it was made six years ago that Briggs has kept it and used it ever since. Like Calder's map, it eliminates unnecessary information: There are a number of side streets between Union Chapel Road and Dupont, for example, but Briggs' father-in-law left them off because they're irrelevant to the route.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Good hand-drawn maps do more than edit out useless details. They often ignore the mapmaking convention that puts north at the top. That's what&nbsp;<em><strong>Slate</strong></em>&nbsp;reader Don Davis has done in the next map, a well-ordered guide to an area near St. Louis. The drawing is for a traveler coming south on I-55, and it puts south—not north—at the top of the page. Information designer Paul Stiff notes that Davis' approach is common among nonprofessionals because it makes maps easier to use: &quot;If you're following a map from the bottom of the page to the top, it means you don't have to switch left and right.&quot; You also don't have to flip the map upside down to line it up with the road unfurling ahead of you.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Handmade maps also tend toward straight lines and right angles, a phenomenon spatial psychologists refer to as &quot;rectilinear normalization.&quot; The world is full of squiggly roads that intersect at oblique angles. When we envision space, though, we tend to reduce such complexities to relatively simple geometric forms. Consider this next map, of Seeley Lake, Mont., drawn by <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> reader Bonnie Wasson. &quot;If you look at <a href=",+MT&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;ei=7rfVS5PBCoP58Aa8mdS-Cg&amp;ved=0CA0Q_AU&amp;hl=en&amp;f=q&amp;sll=37.0625,-95.677068&amp;sspn=23.875,57.630033&amp;hq=&amp;hnear=Seeley+Lake,+Missoula,+Montana&amp;ll=47.152253,-113.438559&amp;spn=0.034613,0.087719&amp;z=14">these roads</a> on a map of the world according to Google,&quot; Stiff notes, &quot;it's like a bag of snakes. Writhing and tortuous and twisted. But it would be crazy to reproduce that, every twist and turn, for your friends.&quot; So Wasson simplifies reality, imposing a nonexistent grid on her town. The map succeeded in impressing its users, with one guest reporting: &quot;She does a better job than Map Quest!&quot;</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Another advantage of personal cartography: Homemade maps often include error indicators, signs that you've taken a wrong turn or gone too far. Steve Kortenkamp produced the map below—of Safford Peak in Arizona—for the young hikers in his son's Boy Scout troop. You can discern his concern for their well-being in the many warnings he includes: the &quot;barbed wire&quot; you'll hit if you take a wrong turn for the horse ranch, the &quot;cave where you end up if you miss the turn&quot; for the summit, and the &quot;Bridge of Death,&quot; where hikers encounter a &quot;sheer drop on both sides!&quot; The map uses charming drawings to orient hikers, highlighting a saguaro grove and memorable rock outcroppings. Kortenkamp explains that he took such care because the trails are poorly marked, and stranded hikers sometimes &quot;end up calling 911, clinging overnight to the sheer rock face, and finally being plucked by helicopter in the morning.&quot; Using this map, his son's Boy Scout troop fared much better.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Hand-drawn maps are often most useful in places like Safford Peak, where the terrain is wild and the routes uncertain. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> reader Ruben Flores was part of an <a href="">emergency medical team</a> working in a remote part of Kashmir after the Pakistan earthquake in 2005. &quot;Our team was supposed to work out of an established field hospital,&quot; Flores reports. &quot;Our helicopter, however, dropped us off about an hour's walk through impassable terrain. Oops. A Pakistan Army Colonel received us and helped us get our bearings. … With the help of this map, we were able to plan mobile clinics to reach those who had been without any access to healthcare.&quot; Stiff observes that it's clear how much the &quot;emergency map&quot; pictured below was needed and used: &quot;It shows all the signs of wear and age. It's been torn and damaged and folded countless times. It looks kept as a token, a memorial to that experience of being there.&quot;</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Hand-drawn maps can be a boon for first responders, who must travel swiftly and can't afford to get lost. Washington, D.C., firefighter Oleg Pelekhaty submitted the map below, drawn on a stationhouse blackboard by his &quot;wagon driver&quot; Tony Kelleher. &quot;To get his job, Tony studied for a year: hundred blocks, alleys, addresses and hydrants. That's right, he even knows where every hydrant in the surrounding area is, and just about every address, even the oddball ones. Every day, Tony draws a map on the blackboard, from memory, to help us 'back step' guys learn the area.&quot; This map, which shows an eight-block stretch of 14<sup>th</sup> Street Northwest, doesn't highlight a specific route, but it shows potential destinations with more detail than a standard road map. That morning's exercise for Pelekhaty's crew: &quot;[G]ive the address of each numbered building.&quot;</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Although Google is in the process of <a href="">mapping some interior spaces</a>, it will be a long time before the world's interiors are comprehensively charted by the pros. Consequently, hand-drawn maps are an essential tool for travelers who need to navigate complex areas indoors. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> reader Maryanne Mutch sent us a guide to the Jordanian border terminal at the Alenbi Bridge crossing between Israel and Jordan. She designed the map below to help the recipient locate the cheapest transportation options, group taxis and buses that are easier to find from the Palestinian (and nontourist-oriented) side of the terminal. &quot;Of course, if it is your first time through,&quot; she says, you may &quot;have no idea that the Palestinian side even exists.&quot; Her map conveys both the peculiarities of the space and thrifty advice only an experienced traveler could provide.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Paul Stiff is confident that personalized route planners like Google Maps won't render hand-drawn maps like the ones collected here obsolete any time soon. As we saw in the submissions from <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> readers, homemade maps can be better than professional ones at eliminating extraneous detail, playing with scale, simplifying complex forms, and mapping remote terrain or interiors. Indeed, some computer scientists have examined whether professional route-mapping algorithms could produce maps more like the ones we draw. MacArthur grant winner Maneesh Agrawala developed software called Line Drive that works <a href="">along these lines</a>, making computer maps more legible by distorting scale and straightening out bendy roads. Like Paul Stiff, Agrawala studies information display, and he became interested in Web-based driving directions&nbsp;when he noticed the limitations of their maps: &quot;They almost never produce a map that I can actually use to get to the destination,&quot; Agrawala told me. &quot;Really the text directions are what I end up using.&quot;&nbsp;When he rolled out Line Drive, users responded positively to the maps in surveys, and Microsoft bought the technology in the early '00s. Although it hasn't been incorporated into Bing Maps, Microsoft's current mapping platform, you can still find and use Line Drive maps at, if you use a browser other than Explorer and click on the radio button that says &quot;Line Drive.&quot; Asked to plot a drive from the Empire State Building to Old North Church in Boston, Line Drive produces the following image:</p> <p>Even if all computerized route maps eventually learn to mimic the most useful aspects of our homemade creations, we'll keep drawing maps for one another and for ourselves. We'll do it because we'll come up with new things to chart and convey, and because we like to share our spatial understanding of the world. In the late '90s, Justin M. Spivey drew the map below to help his friends avoid the Delaware Turnpike toll ($1.25 when the map was drawn; $4 today). He says it worked better as a &quot;conversation piece&quot; than as a map, even at the time; it was a way to reveal his clever solution. Today, of course, Google will give you the same route if you click the &quot;avoid tolls&quot; option. But the resulting directions won't have the mischievous verve of the instructions below.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>And it's unlikely that any software would produce the following map, drawn for a <em><strong>Slate</strong></em> reader by a friend: It's a guide to the neighborhoods of Paris, put in terms a young New Yorker can understand. Although the map is simplistic and juvenile, the effort to match Parisian <em>arrondissements</em> with demographically corresponding areas in Brooklyn is a conceptually interesting way to present information about an unfamiliar town.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p>Above all, we'll keep making maps because we're fond of them. In 2008, artist and graphic designer Kris Harzinski founded the Web site <a href=""></a>, which hosts a collection of beautiful specimens. Harzinski started the site after he found a map in which a North Dakotan <a href="">sketched the United States</a>, jumbling much of the East Coast. He believes we'll keep making maps: &quot;The Google Map is sort of generic, whereas you can add so much of your own interpretation of the place, you can add your own personality to the place&quot; when you draw it. &quot;What's most interesting to me about the maps is the stories behind them. Each map is a particular record of something that happened in time.&quot;<br /> <br /> I was similarly moved by the maps readers sent in, each of which told a story—of a research trip, a tractor ride, a summer vacation, a year abroad, a romance. Readers sent maps from their childhood and maps from their children. This one, drawn in 1998 by Nathan English, charts rivers and campsites in Nepal, and the locations of some geochemical samples his team was gathering there. It's a map, a guide, a to-do list, and a memento, and it tells a story more eloquent than any street sign.</p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p><em><strong>More from this series: Why</strong></em> <a href=""><em><strong>signs are better now</strong></em></a><em><strong> than they've ever been; why the signs in</strong></em> <a href=""><em><strong>Penn Station</strong></em></a><em><strong> are so confusing; how smarter signs could make</strong></em> <a href=""><em><strong>London</strong></em></a><em><strong> easier to navigate; the international war over</strong></em> <a href=""><em><strong>the exit sign</strong></em></a><em><strong>; how GPS could</strong></em> <a href=""><em><strong>kill the sign</strong></em></a><em><strong>. Plus: See more road signs in this Magnum Photos</strong></em> <a href=""><em><strong>gallery</strong></em></a><em><strong>.<br /> <br /> </strong></em><em><br /> </em><em></em></p> Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:47:00 GMT Julia Turner 2010-04-28T15:47:00Z Wonderful hand-drawn maps from firefighters, club-hoppers, Boy Scout dads, grandmothers, and Alexander Calder. Life Hand-drawn maps from firefighters, club-hoppers, Boy Scout dads, grandmothers, and Alexander Calder. 2252161 Design Julia Turner Signs false false false Hand-drawn maps from firefighters, club-hoppers, Boy Scout dads, grandmothers, and Alexander Calder. Hand-drawn maps from firefighters, club-hoppers, Boy Scout dads, grandmothers, and Alexander Calder. A World Without Signs <p>In the summer of 2008, a satellite navigation specialist named Colin Beatty fired up a 27-slide Power Point presentation titled &quot;Could personal navigation systems herald the demise of much fixed signage?&quot; Perhaps out of deference to his audience—Beatty was presenting to the <a href="">Sign Design Society</a>, Britain's leading association for environmental graphic design—the tone was somewhat measured. (Note Beatty's use of <em>could </em>and <em>much.</em>) But Beatty, who founded his satnav consultancy <a href="">CBil</a> 23 years ago, had bad news for the sign world: He believes the advent of geolocational technology will eventually kill the sign. </p> <p>Sign designers tend to sniff at predictions of their obsolescence. Satellite navigation technology has been around in one form or another since the 1960s, though consumer applications have gained ground only in the last decade. We can now find personal navigation systems in our cars and in our cellular phones. And the rise of the Internet has also given us access to Web mapping services like Google Maps. But anyone who's ever used an in-car GPS device or a MapQuest printout knows that you still need signs to get you where you're going. When your TomTom tells you to get off the highway at Exit 13, you look for the sign that says Exit 13. Signs reassure us that we're going the right way. They give us real-world confirmation that our new digital advisers are giving us good counsel. </p> <p>But these new tools are inexorably changing the way we navigate. It's true that we use signs in tandem with personal navigation systems today, but that may not always be the case. Beatty envisions a future in which we trust digital directions so completely that we no longer make much use of real-world cues.</p> <p>This theory would have sounded crazy—well, crazier—five or 10 years ago, when these technologies were first coming into their own. Early personal navigation systems were kludgy and sometimes doled out bad advice, telling drivers to go the wrong way down one-way streets or to take old, overgrown, and impassable logging roads through the wilds of New Hampshire. But maps have been getting more accurate. The global titans in the digital mapping field are <a href="">Tele Atlas</a> and <a href="">NAVTEQ</a>, two companies that provide detailed geographic data to the manufacturers of automobiles and onboard navigation systems, and to Web mapping services like Bing and MapQuest. Google has relied on data from both providers over the years and still uses Tele Atlas data in dozens of countries, but it now compiles its own map data in the United States and a number of other markets.</p> <p>Map providers typically rely on both in-house experts and average users to keep their information up-to-date. NAVTEQ, for example, sends its staff geographers around the world in tricked-out vehicles that capture geographic data with cameras and other sensors. But it also uses a tool called Map Reporter, which allows users to correct any misinformation on its maps. Google offers a similar tool called &quot;Report a Problem&quot;—you can see it at the lower right of the screen when you're looking at a Google map. Google's Carter Maslin, a director of product management who focuses on local search, says its users make 10,000 updates an hour to its master map, using &quot;Report a Problem&quot; and some related tools. Maslin himself used the tool to help a friend of his father's register a one-way street that was designated improperly and made it difficult for people to find his house.</p> <p>Lately, the big mappers have been getting increasingly ambitious. They don't just want to build accurate maps of every drivable road in the world. They want to build accurate maps of literally everything: the road, its elevation and curves, the facades of buildings next to it, the entrances to local points of interest, the angles of intersections. NAVTEQ even logs each sign on major highways, allowing some of its clients to offer a service called &quot;sign as real&quot;: As you approach a real-world sign, your personal navigation device can show you a digital version of it, with the information you need highlighted and the guidance you don't need grayed out. The ultimate goal, says NAVTEQ's Sara Rossio, a director of global project management, is to create &quot;a digital 3-D representation of the world.&quot; </p> <p>Although digital maps and the personal navigation devices that they power have yet to reach their full potential, they're already changing the way we get around. The first thing wayfinding designers have noticed is that personal navigation tools limit our ability to learn routes. The cell phone, with its handy digital directory, has eliminated the need for people to remember telephone numbers. GPS seems to have a similar effect on our navigational skills: It obviates our need to memorize routes and may even diminish our capacity to do so. Since the early 1980s, cognitive researchers have <a href="">argued</a> that it is the <em>process</em> of deciding which route to take that helps us develop our mental map of a place and remember how to navigate it the next time we pass through. People who use GPS systems tend to retain less information about the world they encounter. Greg Giordano, who designs wayfinding systems for PageSoutherlandPage in Austin, Texas, notes that the technology gets us where we need to go without teaching us anything: It's not very good at &quot;making us smarter about places.&quot; </p> <p>As a result, personal navigation tools foster our dependence on them. (Rather than teaching us to fish, as the old parable would have it, they just give us the fish, again and again.) Which means that once we start using them, we're unlikely to stop. </p> <p>The advent of personal navigation technology has also changed the scope of the wayfinding designer's job. Guiding visitors around a hospital, mall, or convention center used to start at the front door. Design firms would clearly mark building entrances and post prominent orientation tools immediately inside the lobby. Wayfinding guidance would proceed from there. Getting to the front door was left up to the visitor, who might rely on a listing in the yellow pages or directions from a receptionist reached by phone. Today, though, design firms have found that visitors often plan their routes online. As a result, when wayfinding planners think about where to put information, they now have a lot more options than signs. Sometimes text on a Web site is more useful than text printed on a wall. </p> <p>For instance, it's useful to make sure your client's Web site doesn't send people to a P.O. Box two towns over. Mark VanderKlipp, the president of Corbin Design, a wayfinding firm in Traverse City, Mich., remembers one client—a hospital in Westchester County, New York—that used a mailing address half a mile down the road from the hospital's main entrance. Patients and visitors would punch that address—listed prominently on the hospital's Web site—into their onboard navigation systems and end up on a grim stretch of road with no hospital in sight. When VanderKlipp's company took the job, he recalls, staff members were spending &quot;a lot of time arguing with people on their cell phones and telling them, You can't use your GPS to find the hospital.&quot; VanderKlipp's team pointed out that changing the hospital's listed address might be easier than changing the way people get around. So they contacted the post office, which agreed to assign a new street address to the hospital's main entrance, and then posted the new listing on the site. (One funny side effect of the satnav revolution: It's made the post office newly relevant. Although it's possible to navigate using just latitudes and longitudes, most American users prefer to type in a post office-issued street address.) VanderKlipp's team also made sure to submit the new information to the biggest digital mapping companies so that the hospital became easier to find. </p> <p>Wayfinding designers have just begun to tap into the new tools at their disposal, and so far, they've been dealing primarily with digital concerns like the one VanderKlipp faced above. But eventually, these new navigational tools will change the way we design and use physical signs in the real world, too. What will these changes look like? A more moderate theory was laid out for me by Craig Berger, the director of education for the Society for Environmental Graphic Design. He notes that wayfinding signs typically serve one of two key functions: They identify where you are (a street, a district, a hospital complex), or they direct you where to go (turn left for Poughkeepsie, right for New Paltz). He speculates that as drivers and pedestrians have increasing access to personal navigation systems, designers will spend more time on the first kind of signage and less on the second. &quot;You wouldn't need 20 signs to get to the Franklin Institute,&quot; Berger says. &quot;But you would need signs to direct you to the right parking lot, and then you'd also need signs to give you an understanding of where it existed in the city, as part of what district.&quot; In other words, signs will do some of the contextual orienting work—teaching us how a region fits together, and not just our own route—that personal navigation tools aren't so good at.</p> <p>The more extreme theory, the one that Beatty espouses, holds that eventually we won't need signs at all. Once the map databases are good enough, he told me, we'll come to trust our digital navigators as much as we now trust our own eyes. We won't need that sign confirming that we have, in fact, arrived at Exit 13 or the entrance to the Franklin Institute; our GPS's assurance will be good enough for us. This sounds extreme, but automobile companies and map developers are already collaborating to give our cars an extremely precise sense of where we are. Sara Rossio of NAVTEQ told me that one automotive client uses Navteq's database to track curves in the road, so its cars are able to turn their headlights in anticipation of impending hairpin turns. </p> <p>Presented with this scenario, sign designers tend to say, <em>I'll believe it when I see it. </em>They also point out that personal navigation tools, though increasingly widespread, are far from universal. (In 2009, one analyst <a href="">estimated</a> that 150 million systems were in use worldwide.) But Beatty notes that maintaining an extensive network of road signs is expensive. Twenty years from now, when a state can see that most of its population relies on satellite navigation, will it want to spent as much money maintaining signs that serve the minority of users—likely poor and elderly ones—who don't? Beatty acknowledges that in this future, we may need some basic emergency signs as a fail-safe. But that's about it.</p> <p>The last refuge of the sign designer has for a long time been interior signage. Although global positioning technology can get us to the front door of wherever we're going, navigating interior spaces—like a shopping mall, a hospital, or the labyrinth at <a href="">Penn Station</a>—seems at the moment like a task best aided by signs. Even that, however, may not always be the case. Google and NAVTEQ are both working to develop interior mapping initiatives: tools that would allow users to obtain walking directions for destinations inside big structures. These might use <a href="">RFID technology</a>, currently used to track products in retail outlets like Wal-Mart, to help geolocate visitors, or they might rely on wifi or souped-up versions of the GPS technology available today. Either way, what it means is that sign design—a profession seemingly enjoying its golden age—is on the verge of having to reinvent itself.</p> <p>For the most part, though, designers welcome the challenge. Greg Giordano sounded typically intrigued by the possibilities: &quot;There's an opportunity for signs on walls to become intelligent, to recognize people as they approach, and to give them directions based on where they've indicated they want to go.&quot; Once we can link together smart signs with satellite navigation and a locator device like a phone, we may eventually live in a world where &quot;the building knows where you want to go, and it helps you get there. That's the ultimate end goal for the interior.&quot; And an entirely new direction for signs.</p> <p><em></em></p> <p><strong><em>More from this series: Why </em></strong><em><strong> <a href="">signs are better now</a></strong></em><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em>than they've ever been;</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;why </em></strong><strong><em>the signs in</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em> <a href="">Penn Station</a></em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em>are so confusing; how smarter signs could make</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em> <a href="">London</a></em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em>easier to navigate; the international war over</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em> <a href="">the exit sign</a>. Plus: Send Slate your</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em> <a href="">hand-drawn maps</a>.</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><em><strong>See more road signs in this Magnum Photos</strong></em><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em> <a href=""><em>gallery</em></a></em></strong><em><strong>.</strong></em></p> <p>Become a fan of <a href=""><em><strong>Slate</strong> on Facebook</em></a><em>. Follow us on </em> <a href=""><em>Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p> Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:36:00 GMT Julia Turner 2010-03-12T00:36:00Z Does the advent of GPS mean we'll no longer need them? Life Could GPS create a world without signs? 2246108 Design Julia Turner Signs false false false Could GPS create a world without signs? Could GPS create a world without signs? The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man <p><strong></strong></p> <p>The classic American emergency exit sign—the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T—seems at first glance like an unimpeachable bit of sign design. The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like). If you're reading this in a coffee shop, cubicle, or other public place, pause and look around you; it probably won't take long to find that glowing red beacon.</p> <p>But people in the rest of the world—at least, the kind of people who spend time considering how to mark a means of emergency egress—think our simple red sign is completely nuts. Many other countries use some version of the ISO standard, a symbol developed the late 1970s by a Japanese designer named Yukio Ota and adopted for international use in 1985. This take on the exit sign goes by the informal name &quot;the running man,&quot; and looks like this:</p> <p>Fans of Ota's running man point to two key advantages: It's a pictogram, and it's green. The sign's wordlessness means it can be understood even by people who don't speak the local language. And the green color, they argue, just makes sense. Green is the color of safety, a color that means <em>go</em> the world over. Red, on the other hand, most often means <em>danger, alert, halt, please don't touch</em>. Why confuse panicked evacuees with a sign that means <em>right this way</em> in a color that means <em>stop</em>? International designers tend to think our system is illogical and consider our rejection of the running man to be as dumb as our refusal to adopt that other sensible international norm, the metric system.</p> <p>Are the running-man advocates right? This battle over the exit sign has been brewing for 25 years now, and the little green guy is slowly making inroads in the States. But to understand whether he should triumph, we must first understand America's skepticism toward pictograms and symbols, which have long been more popular in the rest of the world than they are here.</p> <p>American signs tend to be wordy. In most places in the United States, it's safe to assume people speak English. As a result, our sign systems have typically communicated in text. Europe, by contrast, developed symbolic road signs as early as 1968. On a continent where you can't drive for more than a few hours before encountering a new language, the pictorial approach made sense.</p> <p>The text-based American exit sign has its origins in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a blaze in a downtown Manhattan garment factory that killed 146 workers. Although signage was not primarily to blame for those fatalities—many factory doors were bolted shut in an effort to keep employees from slipping out—the exits were not clearly marked. That massive loss of life spurred the National Fire Protection Association, which had been founded in 1896 by insurance companies to develop protocols for property preservation, to take up what it called &quot;life safety&quot;: the business of getting people out of burning buildings intact. In the 1930s and '40s, the NFPA developed criteria for emergency-exit signage, evaluating contrast levels and testing different sizes and stroke widths for lettering, eventually publishing standards that were adopted by state and local governments across the land. Robert Solomon, who runs the NFPA's Building Fire Protection and Life Safety departments, explains why the original designs used English prose instead of symbols: &quot;The U.S. was more parochial then.&quot; He suspects that designers never considered whether foreign residents &quot;knew what E-X-I-T meant.&quot;</p> <p>Over the next few decades, however, designers around the world began to use graphical symbols with increasing frequency, especially in busy pedestrian environments where speakers of multiple languages were likely to congregate: airports, train stations, and—funnily enough—the Olympics. For the Mexico City Games in 1968, the American designer Lance Wyman introduced a <a href="">system of pictograms</a> so comprehensive the tickets were <a href="">nearly textless</a>. In the late '60s, British airports introduced a set of pictograms, some of which are still in use. (Keep <a href="">Mary Quant</a> in mind next time you see the unusual, bell-shaped dress of the women's toilet icon at Heathrow.)</p> <p>America made its first great pictographic strides in 1974, when the Department of Transportation collaborated with the AIGA—the largest national professional group for designers—to standardize <a href="">a series of pictograms</a> for use at terminals and stations throughout the United States. (If you've ever wondered why there's a pipe in <a href="">the common symbol for shops</a>, wonder no more: The icon was designed in an era when people still smoked.) Although the AIGA-DOT symbol set is widely regarded as a first-rate group of pictograms, its <a href="">exit sign</a> was confusing and never caught on. And so the red &quot;EXIT&quot; sign rolled on.</p> <p>While the ubiquitous red sign faced no competition stateside, a challenger would emerge from the Far East. In the late '70s, a Japanese association devoted to fire safety held a contest to design a new national emergency exit sign. It received 3,300 entries and—after a period of rigorous testing to determine whether each symbol could be readily understood in a smoky environment—settled on one submitted by a designer named Yukio Ota: a figure on a green ground, running out a door.</p> <p>Once his concept was selected, Ota worked with the Japanese fire safety commission and the government to fine-tune the design. He remembers presenting 58 variations of the running man, tweaking the angle of the legs after a member of the committee objected to a figure that looked like he was sprinting out the door. The goal, Ota recalls, was to suggest that people should &quot;run <em>slowly</em>.&quot;</p> <p>Around that time, the International Organization for Standardization was preparing to publish a series of standards regulating graphical symbols. The ISO was founded after World War II, primarily to ease international trade. It issues international standards for everything from the sizes of piston rings to the threads of screws. In 1980, Japan submitted the running man to the ISO for consideration as an international exit symbol. At the time, Ota recalls, the ISO was about to adopt a Soviet proposal, but it agreed to consider his because of the extensive testing that supported the design. The Soviets squalled, but Ota's design won out. Japanese newspapers crowed with triumph when the hometown sign was selected as the international norm.</p> <p>For Ota, the most remarkable thing was not that his design won but how similar his design was to the Soviets'. They, too, had submitted a figure of a man running out a door. He was amazed that two design teams, working independently, would develop such similar concepts, and the coincidence convinced him of the essential rightness of the running man. He came to believe he had designed not just Yukio Ota's exit sign, not just a Japanese exit sign, but a fundamentally human exit sign, one that speaks to some primal cognitive notion of escape.</p> <p>Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe's increasingly industrial economy. Neurath used pictograms—for man, woman, sugar, wheat, gunship, etc.—to produce infographics that he displayed to packed crowds in a convention hall in Vienna, Austria. Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. In 1964, Ota even invented a symbolic language called <a href="">LoCoS</a>, the Lovers' Communication System, which supposedly took just an hour to learn. (Click <a href="">here to see some of the symbols used</a>.) Ota's colleague and fellow icon designer Aaron Marcus recalls that LoCoS was intended to &quot;bring human beings together and … help them love each other a little bit better.&quot;</p> <p>The running man is thus the child of both rigorous science and starry-eyed utopianism, and it's now in use all over the globe. Even regions that don't use Ota's classic design often use variations of it. A recent European Council directive, for example, requires a running man on a green ground, but the symbol it offers as an example of an acceptable sign shows a man running toward, not through, a door. As a result, although the directive allows Ota's symbol, variations like the one at left are common in Europe. (The ISO is currently urging the EC to revise the directive.)</p> <p>Despite the running man's widespread appeal, the NFPA has no plans to substitute it for the &quot;EXIT&quot; any time soon. &quot;We update and revise [our] code every three years,&quot; the NFPA's Solomon told me. &quot;At some point during that update, this issue always comes up.&quot; But the NFPA sees no real reason to make a switch. Solomon points out that when the NFPA investigates fires, it never encounters circumstances &quot;where someone says <em>I didn't know where the exit was because I didn't know … what the exit sign was</em>. When they don't know where the exit is, it's because there was no signage there whatsoever.&quot;</p> <p>Solomon knows what it's like to look for exits in a foreign land. Whenever he travels, the first thing he does is find the fire exits on his floor. (This is one of the perils of working at the NFPA, he explains.) In international hotels, he argues, it's not so difficult to decipher the word <em>exit</em> written in an alien language or even in an alien script. That's because in our efforts to decipher signs, we don't rely entirely on the sign itself. We take architectural cues from the sign's location: <em>Is it at the end of a corridor? Is it near a door? </em>We also look for indications of its significance: <em>Is it illuminated? Is it in danger red or safety green?</em> As a result, Solomon said, he had no trouble understanding an exit sign in Arabic that he spotted at a hotel in Egypt.</p> <p>It's not that the NFPA objects to the running man. It acknowledges that green is a sensible color for exit signs. In fact, it has never mandated that &quot;EXIT&quot; signs be red; it only mandates the contrast between the text and the background. The NFPA even includes the ISO running man in a group of auxiliary symbols its members might want to use and allows the use of pictograms in tandem with the &quot;EXIT&quot; text, where local jurisdictions allow. It simply has no plans to eliminate the &quot;EXIT&quot; sign, which it believes still works perfectly fine.</p> <p>Still, the NFPA's nods to internationalism are beginning to change the American exit sign. In recent years, more green &quot;EXIT&quot; signs have gone up around the country, although red ones still predominate. And in 2006, New York City changed its fire code to mandate that high-rises include the ISO pictogram on fire doors on each floor. I was surprised to learn about this ruling; the new <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> offices in Manhattan feature more bright scarlet squares than a box of red hots. But, sure enough, on the fire door itself, the running man makes his green escape.</p> <p>New Yorkers may also soon see a version of the running man in the subway system. The MTA is in the process of rolling out a new series of pictograms designed by icon guru Mies Hora. These include symbols for &quot;watch the gap&quot;—Hora was hired after an 18-year-old girl <a href="">fell between her train and the platform</a> and was killed at an LIRR station in Queens, N.Y.—and a host of other station functions. Hora has proposed that the MTA pair a traditional &quot;EXIT&quot; marking with a running man, both in green; the MTA will decide how to roll out his proposals over the next few years.</p> <p>Although the case for the universal symbol has a certain logic, I find myself resisting it on some gut level. Ota's running man is elegant and efficient, but a bit quiet compared with the blaring red cubes I'm used to. Encountering it in London last month, I found it retiring and shy. In a fire, wouldn't we want signs to shout at us a bit?</p> <p>It's impossible for me to say, though, whether I'm just expressing a preference for what I'm used to. Hora says that the &quot;EXIT&quot; sign is now so familiar to Americans that it has essentially become a symbol to us. That's why he wouldn't have suggested replacing the MTA's &quot;EXIT&quot; signs with running men even if he'd been able to. A dual-sign approach is a bit like training wheels, a way to help us learn the unfamiliar symbol. And as Americans grow increasingly accustomed to using icons in everyday life—scan your computer screen quickly as you read this and you'll see dozens of them—the running man will gain ground. Eventually, we'll know it on sight, and green will feel like a natural color for an emergency escape. And then, perhaps, we'll see the red &quot;EXIT&quot; disappear.</p> <p><em><em><strong></strong></em></em></p> <p><strong><em>More from this series: Why </em></strong><em><strong><a href="">signs are better now</a></strong></em><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em>than they've ever been;</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;why </em></strong><strong><em>the signs in</em></strong><strong><em> </em></strong><strong><em><a href="">Penn Station</a></em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em>are so confusing; how smarter signs could make</em></strong><strong><em> <a href="">London</a></em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em>easier to navigate; how GPS could </em></strong><strong><em><a href="">kill the sign</a></em></strong><strong><em>. Plus: Send Slate your</em></strong><strong><em> <a href="">hand-drawn maps</a>.</em></strong><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong><em><strong>See more road signs in this Magnum Photos</strong></em><strong><em> <a href=""><em>gallery</em></a></em></strong><em><strong>.</strong></em></p> Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:01:00 GMT Julia Turner 2010-03-08T21:01:00Z The international war over exit signs. Life The Big Red Word, the Little Green Man, and the International War Over Exit Signs 2246107 Design Julia Turner Signs false false false The Big Red Word, the Little Green Man, and the International War Over Exit Signs The Big Red Word, the Little Green Man, and the International War Over Exit Signs A classic American exit sign Do You Draw Good Maps? <p>Suppose you have a friend from out of town staying with you for the weekend. You've caught up, you've gone to the museum, you've had a nice dinner. It's now Sunday morning, and you just want your house guest to leave for a while so you can do your laundry. &quot;Why don't you walk downtown?&quot;you'll say. &quot;There's a bookstore you might like<em>.</em>&quot; And then you draw him a map.</p> <p>In this series I've been examining the world of <a href="">professional sign design</a>. But the pros aren't the only people who make tools that help us get around. Whenever we guide someone to the supermarket, the conference room, a surfing spot, or the Coke machine, we design what the pros would call our own wayfinding systems, devices that help people navigate.</p> <p>Paul Stiff, a reader in typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, studies information design, and he is fascinated by these fragments of &quot;demotic&quot; wayfinding. Stiff has been accumulating homespun maps for three decades now. One of his very first finds: a map picked up from the floor of a corridor at his work, something that was &quot;literally, a back-of-the-envelope sketch.&quot;</p> <p>Stiff believes that we amateurs have something to teach the pros. Our maps are efficient—they edit out unnecessary information. They often include what Stiff calls &quot;an error detector, something that tells you something's gone wrong.&quot; (<em>If you see the red barn, you've gone too far.</em>) They adhere not to mapmaking norms but to the user's particular needs. This map, drawn for Stiff by a friend in Greece, abandons the cardinal points—that scribble at the top is the sea, which is actually to the southwest of Thessalonika—and spells out the name of a local tavern in Greek script, to help Stiff recognize the sign.</p> <p>The maps we draw for one another also have a certain ephemeral beauty. Each map is the product of a conversation. While most professional maps serve &quot;countless numbers of people who have countless purposes,&quot; Stiff says, maps like these are &quot;made for an audience of one.&quot; Examining these bits of personal cartography—studying the ways &quot;we edit, we twist, we rearrange, supportively&quot;—can teach us how humans really perceive and understand maps.</p> <p>So here's our request: Send us your maps! Please <strong>do not </strong>sit down and draft a beautiful, geographically accurate and impeccably stylish sketch of your hometown. We want <strong>found</strong> objects, maps that were really drawn in a specific moment to orient a real person for a real task.</p> <p><em><em><strong>Update, April 29, 2010: </strong></em>We are no longer accepting submissions. You can see some of the coolest maps <a href="">submitted by <strong>Slate </strong>readers </a><a>here</a>.</em></p> <p><strong><em><strong><em>More from this series: Why</em> <a>signs </a><a href="">are better now</a><em>&nbsp;than they've ever been;&nbsp;why </em></strong><strong><em>the signs in</em> Penn Station <a></a><em><a href="">are so confusing;</a> how smarter signs could make <a href="">London</a> easier to navigate; the international war over <a></a><a href="">the exit sign</a>; how GPS could <a href="">kill the sign</a>. Plus: See more road signs in this Magnum Photos <a href="">gallery</a>.</em></strong></em></strong></p> Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:23:00 GMT Julia Turner 2010-03-04T21:23:00Z A professor has been examining hand-drawn maps for three decades. Send him yours. Life Send Slate your hand-drawn maps! 2246106 Design Julia Turner Signs false false false Send Slate your hand-drawn maps! Send Slate your hand-drawn maps! A map of a Midwestern town, drawn for Paul Stiff by a friend Legible London <p>London is a city without an organizing principle. Its streets aren't numbered, like New York's, or lettered, like those in Washington, D.C. It's not laid out on a grid, like Chicago, and no <a href="'s_renovation_of_Paris">Haussmann ever came through to organize its avenues</a>. London is just a bunch of villages that grew and grew until they merged into a giant, wriggling blob. Many of the city's roads date back to medieval times and are so twisty and short that locals don't use the term &quot;block&quot;—it's far too regular-sounding to apply to the odd-angled polygons formed by the city's streets.</p> <p>As a result, even Londoners get lost in London. Natives often walk around with street atlases—the famous &quot;<a href="">A to Zeds</a>&quot;—in their pockets. Cab drivers must undertake years of intensive study (to acquire what's called &quot;the knowledge&quot;) before they're let loose on city streets. When Transport for London removed the River Thames, one of the city's key orienting landmarks, <a href="">from the tube map</a> last year, citizens were discombobulated and outraged. The mayor, Boris Johnson, <a href="">resorted to Twitter</a>: &quot;Can't believe that the Thames disappeared off the tube map whilst I was out the country! It will be reinstated ...&quot; (It was.) Google Maps has made London somewhat easier to navigate, but the city comprises 32 boroughs, and you must know what borough a street is in to find it on the site, a difficult task if you're new to town.</p> <p>London is, in short, a city where pedestrians could use some direction. They're about to get it, in the form of an urban wayfinding system called <a href="">Legible London</a>. It's an ambitious effort to remake the way people see and use the city. And if it's successful, London will be a less congested, less polluted, healthier place.</p> <p>Wayfinding signage for city streets is very different from the wayfinding programs you find in transportation environments like <a href="">Penn Station</a> or Heathrow. In an airport, the signs boss you around: <em>Check in, go to security, proceed to your gate. </em>On city streets, good signs are more like valets: They give you options, telling you about nearby attractions and helping you figure out where you want to go. Transport wayfinding gets you from point A to point B, but good urban wayfinding systems help you develop your own mental map of a place. As a result, they're often more aesthetically complicated than the this-way-to-baggage-claim arrows that confront harried air travelers; they usually include extensive maps or provide an index of streets or amenities.</p> <p>Urban wayfinding systems seemed deeply experimental—and a little weird—when a few cities rolled them out in the late 1980s and early '90s. Skeptics wondered why a city should spend thousands, even millions, of dollars to install and maintain an expensive sign system. Couldn't tourists just use their own maps? But wayfinding advocates believed that modern cities should be, above all, usable.</p> <p>These early systems drew largely on Kevin Lynch's seminal 1960 book <a href=""><em>The Image of the City</em></a><em>, </em>which featured research on how humans respond emotionally and cognitively to the aesthetic structures of modern cities. Lynch believed we instinctively identify five key forms in an urban environment: paths (routes we travel on), edges (barriers and boundaries), nodes (central intersections), districts (areas with distinctive character) and landmarks (notable building or sights). Even today, this taxonomy underpins urban wayfinding. In London, for example, the River Thames is a crucial edge; people locate themselves in relationship to the river, which is why even the mayor was flummoxed when it disappeared from the tube map.</p> <p>Since urban wayfinding systems must pass muster with bureaucrats and neighbors, getting them approved and installed can be a laborious process. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that comprehensive systems are more commonly found in smaller cities, where the red tape is slightly less sticky. Some of the earliest notable installations were in Philadelphia and Bristol, England. Legible London marks one of the first efforts to subdue a city so immense.</p> <p>Why is London willing to try out new signage? Surprisingly, it has a lot to do with the success of an earlier sign—the <a href="">amazing, iconic London subway map</a>. When people picture London, they often picture Harry Beck's diagram of the tube. But the tube map—though a groundbreaking, elegant, and useful piece of information design—bears only a hazy relationship to the city's real layout. The map, which was first released in 1933, abandoned the geographically accurate style then customary among transit maps. Previous maps of the London system had been hard to read, because they squeezed the stops in central London close together in an effort to make room for the elongating tentacles of suburban lines. Beck deduced that transit maps don't have to be—and perhaps shouldn't be—straightforward geographical representations. And so he straightened out the map's lines and enlarged its scale in the center of London, enabling passengers to understand how the city's most-used stations and lines connected.</p> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Beck's approach has been much emulated since—so much so that it's rare, these days, to find a metropolitan transit map that doesn't take some liberties with geography. But there's one major downside of Beck's map, especially considering that it's a primary means of understanding the city for locals and tourists alike: The tube diagram gives users mistaken impressions about distance—in particular, locations that are in fact quite close together can appear far apart.</p> <p>As a result, people often overestimate the difficulty of walking to nearby locations, taking the familiar tube instead. In recent years, as the tube has become more congested, that's become a problem. The tube in central London often operates at maximum capacity. At rush hour, the Oxford Circus station—located in a busy shopping district—can get so crowded it will close its doors, waiting to clear passengers from the station before it lets new ones in. As a result, the mayor's office and <a href="">Transport for London</a> (the agency that runs the Underground) have been looking for ways to encourage walking in the city. They see Legible London as a step in that direction.</p> <p>Legible London hopes to reduce tube congestion by showing Londoners how disparate pockets of the city link up. Step one is to produce a geographically accurate map of London that's designed for pedestrian use and includes key landmarks—major stores, architectural oddities, even details like the style of pavement—that will help walkers find their way. Step two is to make that map available to as many people as possible, by posting it on street signs, tube stations, and bus shelters, and by making copies available to locals and tourists in shops and hotels. The project has been developed by AIG Group, a design firm based in London. A prototype was rolled out in London's Mayfair neighborhood in 2007, and in 2009, the city opted to launch pilots in several other areas: Covent Garden and Bloomsbury, South Bank and Bankside, and Richmond and Twickenham.</p> <p>Legible London is an unusually narrow project in its focus on pedestrians. Most American urban wayfinding systems, like the ones in Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C., are designed for drivers and pedestrians, linking highway signage to major city streets to parking options to pedestrian pathways. Legible London's brief is simply to get people to walk more. Still, the London project offers an interesting window onto how urban sign systems have evolved over the past few decades.</p> <p>One crucial component is the map. Traditionally, maps on these sorts of signs offered a bird's-eye view of the area in question, and were oriented with north at the top. Over the years, though, designers have learned that people tend to do better with maps that detail what the facades of buildings look like—a helpful feature for users who have trouble extrapolating from a 2-D map to the 3-D world around them. Legible London's maps put this principle into practice, featuring <a href="">axonometric</a> renderings of key landmarks.</p> <p>Tim Fendley, the AIG designer heading up the Legible London project, says his firm's aim is &quot;to help people insert themselves into the map.&quot; AIG tested several orientations during the development period, and users consistently preferred a &quot;heads-up&quot; orientation that puts whatever the user is facing at the top. While there were a few complaints from military men who objected to the deviation from the north-at-the-top standard, Fendley says, &quot;We kind of figured they didn't need the help.&quot;</p> <p>Another hallmark of modern wayfinding design is an evidence-based approach. Fendley's team stood on street corners in Mayfair every Friday morning for a period of months, often holding up enormous prototype maps and observing user response. These tests helped determine, for example, that the signs needed an index. Although architects had suggested doing away with the index for the sake of clean design, Fendley's team found that this frustrated users: &quot;We took [one] out there, and three people came up and looked at it and said 'Where's Swallow Passage?' And I knew it was there; I knew the map by heart. And I was thinking, <em>It's there! It's there!</em> But they were like, 'Oh, rubbish!' And off they went. And I thought, 'Damn. We're going to need an index.' &quot;</p> <p>Another item that tested poorly was the original &quot;You Are Here&quot; icon. But AIG found that another element on its map—the target circles it used to show which destinations are within a 5-minute walk, and which are within a 15-minute walk—helped snap the user's attention to the center of the map. Initially, the circle was &quot;a lot weaker,&quot; Fendley says, but after positive user response, &quot;we turned the volume up.&quot;</p> <p>AIG also had to make hard choices in deciding which shops and landmarks would make its maps. Because wayfinding systems are often commissioned or supported by business improvement districts—groups of retailers and restaurants who band together to improve services (and, the thinking goes, foot traffic) in their areas—designers often face great pressure to put every single retailer on the map. (Indeed, the <a href="">New West End Company</a>, a business representative group in London, helped support the Legible London prototype.) A map that's overwhelmed with details, though, becomes an unusable mess. And so wayfinding designers typically devise some empirical standard to weed out the big fish from the small fry. When Philadelphia installed its signage system nearly 20 years ago, designers based their decisions on how many visitors each institution received. For Legible London, Fendley and his team devised a points system that took into account, among other things, how well-known a destination was and the length of its lease. (To see how essential such a policy is, compare the clarity of the Legible London map to this remarkably bad map of New York City's Flatiron district, put together by the Flatiron 23<sup>rd</sup> Street Partnership.)</p> <p>The Legible London crew also had to figure out where its signs should be placed. It's a bit simpler to map out the key decision points in a transportation environment—when the corridors split, you want signs telling people which way to go. In the real world, nearly every point is a decision point, so traffic flow is more complicated; as a result, it's crucial to put signs where people will use them, and where they won't be in the way. AIG surveyed foot traffic, mapping out major walking routes so that Legible London's signs could be sited for maximum usability, making sure sightlines were good, and situating signs on both sides of larger streets so pedestrians wouldn't have to cross for directional counsel. The signs' bright-yellow tops are designed to attract the eye from down the street.</p> <p>Fendley's ultimate goal is not to put up a system of signs. Rather, it's to develop a comprehensive map for London, one that's available in tube stations, bus shelters, hotel lobbies and—eventually—on the Web and on mobile phones. Before Legible London can go that far, the city needs to scare up more money. That's where a project as complicated as this one can run into trouble.</p> <p>Cities that install wayfinding sign systems find that the benefits are tangible: They see increases in tourism, commerce, and foot traffic to local institutions. In the case of Legible London, the city tossed two similar groups of 50 pedestrians into the Mayfair district before and after the signs went in, asking each focus group participant to find two destinations. On average, the walkers reached their locales 16 percent more quickly once the wayfinding system was in place. The new pilot programs are a vote of confidence from the city. But the original dream, when this scheme was first discussed, was to have signs in place citywide before London is beset by tourists during the 2012 Olympics. With the city facing budget shortages and a time crunch, that goal will be extremely tough to meet.</p> <p><strong><em>More from this series: Why</em></strong> <a href=""><strong><em>signs are better now</em></strong></a><strong><em>&nbsp;than they've ever been;&nbsp;why the signs in</em></strong> <a href=""><strong><em>Penn Station</em></strong></a><strong><em>&nbsp;are so confusing; the international war over</em></strong> <a href=""><strong><em>the exit sign</em></strong></a><strong><em>; how GPS could</em></strong> <a href=""><strong><em>kill the sign</em></strong></a><strong><em>. Plus: Send Slate your</em></strong> <a href=""><strong><em>hand-drawn maps</em></strong></a><strong><em>.&nbsp;See more road signs in this Magnum Photos</em></strong> <a href=""><strong><em>gallery</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p> <p><em><br /> </em><em></em></p> Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:22:00 GMT Julia Turner 2010-03-04T21:22:00Z Can better signs help people understand an extremely disorienting city? Life Can Better Signs Help Pedestrians Understand London? 2246105 Design Julia Turner Signs false false false Can Better Signs Help Pedestrians Understand London? Can Better Signs Help Pedestrians Understand London? The latest official London Underground map Lost in Penn Station <p>Penn Station is a confusing place. The bustling train terminal, located on the West Side of Manhattan, is a sprawling mass of tracks, corridors, and concourses spread across three levels. It's home to three different railroads—Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the LIRR—and two subway lines. It's the busiest train station in North America, crowded with around 200 million passengers a year. And there's a giant sports arena, Madison Square Garden, squatting on top of it, so much of this activity occurs underground, in low-ceilinged tunnels devoid of sunlight and fresh air. For visitors, it offers a disorienting welcome to the city. By and large, New Yorkers do not like it.</p> <p>One reason they don't like it is that it has bad signs. On, where users have given Penn 2.5 stars out of 5, comments range from &quot;How their signs do stymie!&quot; to &quot;Someone needs to put up some signs as to where the stuff is&quot; to &quot;Without a doubt, one of the poorest and most confusing arrangements for signage and passenger movement that I can imagine.&quot; (Grand Central, by comparison, rates 4.5 stars, and the only comment on its directional signage is: &quot;Signs for different exits are really well posted so you never get turned around.&quot;)</p> <p>Of course, it's not fair to compare Penn Station and Grand Central. Penn sees four times as much traffic and is much more complex. Still, Penn Station signage <em>is</em> confusing, and more confusing than it needs to be. Understanding why—and how it got that way—can teach us a lot about what makes good signage good.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>Consider the case of one traveler and the ways in which Penn Station's signs might confuse her. She's a New Yorker who works downtown, and she needs to catch an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C. The slide show below tracks her journey through the station.</p> <p>Our traveler made it to her train, thanks entirely to the signs pictured here. In that sense, the system worked just fine. But it also put her through unnecessary stress. During her long walk down the main corridor, she passed more than five signs that made no mention of Amtrak, causing her to doubt the route she was on, even though it was right. And when she reached the Amtrak concourse, there was no sign properly identifying that she'd arrived. She had to check the departures board—and see her train to Washington listed—to confirm that she was in the right place. If, at any point, she'd given up and doubled back to the beginning, she would have lost time and been even later for her train. How could these signs be improved?</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>When I first started interviewing sign designers for this series, I was surprised that they didn't talk much about signs. I'd expected to learn a lot about typeface and color selection. Maybe, if I were lucky, a revolutionary new arrow.</p> <p>Instead, I learned there's a reason professionals call what they do not &quot;sign-making&quot; but &quot;wayfinding.&quot; Their goal is to help users find their way through complicated environments. That requires a lot more than good-looking signs. To create a sign system that works, designers must first understand how people will use a space. When beginning a hospital project, they'll map out all the possible routes a visitor might take. <em>How would a patient with an oncology appointment get to it? How about a visitor to the maternity ward?</em> If they're designing new signage for an existing space, they often quiz the security guards. No one knows better what people find confusing.</p> <p>As designers map out the main routes, they also pay attention to the architecture. When people find their way through buildings, they are often guided as much by the space itself as by any posted signs. Does the main lobby look like a lobby, with a front desk and a building directory? If not, visitors may think they have come in the wrong entrance. People are also more likely to get lost in a building without distinguishing features visible from the street. A hospital complex with two prominent towers may be easier to navigate than one situated in a giant boxy building. If the architecture is confusing, wayfinding designers may ask the architects to make changes, or they may devise sign systems that try to clarify the space. (A design team might use three main elevator banks as orienting landmarks, for example, or assign memorable names or different color schemes to distinct zones within the space.)</p> <p>Next the wayfinding team will identify every key decision point—every place where a visitor might stop and think, <em>Where do I go from here?</em> Each one should get a sign; that way users never get confused. It's also important to decide what information will go on each sign, doling out directions only as needed. A woman getting out of a cab at the airport doesn't need to know where the gates are yet—she just needs to know where to check in.</p> <p>Only then, once all this information has been determined, will the wayfinding team start thinking about the design of the signs.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>The problem at Penn Station is not that designers skipped these steps. It's that three sets of designers did them three times. Penn Station is owned by Amtrak, which manages its concourse on the western side of the station. But Amtrak leases the rest of the station out to the two other tenants: New Jersey Transit has the southeast corner, and the LIRR the northeast. <a></a> (The Metropolitan Transportation Authority oversees both the LIRR and New York City Transit, which manages the two adjacent subway stations; their sign systems are similar to the LIRR's.<a>*</a>) The fundamental wayfinding problem at Penn Station lies in the fact that each of these entities manages its own signs, usually without consulting the others. As a result, the station essentially has three different systems of signage.</p> <p>This is a crazy way to manage information at the biggest railway station in the country. The user experiences Penn Station as one place. But the current system assumes that the user experiences the station as three distinct spaces. In truth, though, as we saw in the slide show above, many journeys require travelers to cross from zone to zone.</p> <p>Within each of the station's three concourses, the various wayfinding designers direct users primarily to the tracks and amenities of whomever they're working for. At this, they've done a reasonably good job. It's in directing travelers to other parts of the station that Penn's sign systems often fail.</p> <p>I asked David Gibson, a principal at the firm Two Twelve and the author of a recent book called <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1568987692"><em>The</em><em>Wayfinding Handbook</em></a><em>, </em>to tour the station with me and examine its signage. (Gibson's firm has done some work for both N.J. Transit and the LIRR, but he didn't pull his punches.) <a></a> The Long Island Rail Road concourse—which is where our beleaguered traveler spent most of her journey—is distinctive, awash in the yellowish light reflected on the ceiling of its main corridor and marked by its row of lively shops.<a>*</a> The signage often appears in a band above the retail signage. This gives travelers a consistent place to look, but it also means that directional signs compete with retail signs for attention.</p> <p>The sign style here is derived from the MTA's subway signage system. The aesthetics of these signs are clear and strong. Gibson noted that the white Helvetica type is quite legible on the dark ground and that the type size is sufficient. He also pointed out that what wayfinders call the &quot;information hierarchy&quot;—the relative prominence of the elements on a sign—tends to be fairly good. The concourse managers even play the electronic sound of chirping birds near the track entrances to guide visually impaired travelers to a special kiosk that can help orient them. The key problem, however, is that signs to other parts of the station are sparse and inconsistently located.</p> <p>The Amtrak concourse is abidingly blue, and marked by its higher ceilings. Its signs also use a sans-serif font, although one that's slenderer and more delicate than Helvetica. To Gibson, the style seemed retro; all that blue felt too much like &quot;an old '50s bus station.&quot;</p> <p>Because Amtrak dispatchers control N.J. Transit's trains, the Amtrak departures boards list N.J. Transit departures as well, a nice concession to another station tenant. But even that is slightly confusing: Why not list LIRR departures, too? Although one board is labeled &quot;Amtrak Departures,&quot; the other just says &quot;Departures.&quot; How is the first-time LIRR passenger to know she's in the wrong place?</p> <p>Gibson was impressed by the feel of the New Jersey Transit Concourse, which is the most recently renovated. The architects created a pleasing environment with a pink-and-black-stone color scheme, and the piped-in classical music creates the sensation of a cultured commute.</p> <p>The signs use a serif font—an unusual choice in transportation signage, where sans-serif typefaces have long been in vogue. But most designers agree that serif fonts can work for signage as long as the line spacing and type size is well handled. Here, Gibson felt the size was a little small. It's hard to read any signs but the ones immediately in front of us. This sign even directs N.J. Transit riders to Amtrak and the LIRR, although it might confuse a passenger looking for the subway lines. The low ceilings are probably to blame for the skinny signs and small type—any bigger, and taller passengers might have to duck. Unfortunately, however, given the hulk of Madison Square Garden upstairs, New Jersey Transit can't do much about them.</p> <p><strong><em>Watch a video tour of Penn Station's signage with David Gibson.</em></strong></p> <p>Each of these three sign systems has strengths and weaknesses. But the problems with Penn Station are not, fundamentally, design problems. They're power problems. If the authority in Penn Station were centralized—or if Amtrak stepped up to its role as landlord and decided to address the station's wayfinding problems with a unified sign system—the place could be made less confusing.</p> <p>Mike Gallagher, Amtrak's Superintendent of Passenger Services for Penn, pointed out via e-mail that while each tenant manages its own signs, Penn has &quot;ample signage throughout the station, directing passengers to the area of the station they are looking to travel from.&quot; But having lots of signs is a pale substitute for having signs that really speak to one another.</p> <p>Lance Wyman, a pioneering wayfinding designer, recalls encountering this problem when doing some work for Amtrak at Penn in the 1990s. He told me that after a meeting, he once asked, &quot; 'Who can I talk to to try to coordinate all of this working as one system?' And one guy said, 'Oh, we don't talk to each other.' He was joking but he wasn't joking, you know? I mean, it's the truth!&quot; Penn's tenants do coordinate their efforts on occasion—as when the LIRR and N.J. Transit joined forces <a href="">to promote trains to New Jersey's Meadowlands Stadium</a> last fall—but such initiatives are sporadic and ad hoc.</p> <p>Fixing Penn Station's wayfinding would be a challenge, primarily because the architectural structure of the place is not readily apparent to the traveler. (An irony, given that the original Penn Station, torn down in 1965, was literally transparent—topped with a glass atrium.)</p> <p>The current space, a warren of underground bunkers, is difficult to visualize unless you've been there many times. But David Gibson pointed out that a wayfinding design team could take advantage of the distinct spaces the three tenants have already created. Passengers already sense that the station has different zones; the wayfinding team would need to work to heighten those contrasts, and strengthen the cues that help people identify where they are and where they need to go. Another challenge: The station has an enormous number of entrances. Passengers can enter from several portals to the street, or from scores of stairways from individual rail and subway tracks underground. It would be tricky to determine where to place orienting maps and other cues to welcome new arrivals. But it could be done.</p> <p>Penn Station is a remarkably challenging environment for wayfinding. But it's a useful place to examine, because it highlights the single most crucial thing a wayfinding designer must do: think about the user and understand how he will perceive a space. When signs are good, and you pay attention to them, you can sense the level of thought that went into them. Someone, somewhere, anticipated the journey you are on, and the information you would need. At Penn Station as a whole, it's no one's job to think about how you'll get where you're going. And you can tell.</p> <p><strong><em><strong><em>More from this series: Why</em> <a href="">signs are better now</a><em>&nbsp;than they've ever been;&nbsp;</em></strong><strong><em> how smarter signs could make&nbsp;</em> <a href="">London</a><em>&nbsp;easier to navigate; the international war over&nbsp; <a href="">the exit sign</a>; how GPS could <a href="">kill the sign</a>. Plus: Send Slate your&nbsp; <a href="">hand-drawn maps</a>.&nbsp;See more road signs in this Magnum Photos&nbsp; <a href="">gallery</a>.</em></strong></em></strong></p> <p><em><strong>Correction, <a></a> March 4, 2010: </strong>This piece originally misspelled the LIRR's full name—it's Rail Road, not Railroad. (<a>Return</a> to the corrected sentence.) It also incorrectly referred to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as the Metropolitan Transit Authority. (<a>Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:21:00 GMT Julia Turner 2010-03-01T19:21:00Z Why are the signs at the nation's busiest train hub so confusing? Life Why Are the Signs at New York's Penn Station So Confusing? 2246104 Design Julia Turner Signs false false false Why Are the Signs at New York's Penn Station So Confusing? Why Are the Signs at New York's Penn Station So Confusing? The LIRR concourse at Penn Station The Secret Language of Signs <p>Three years ago today, the 33 members of the Bluffton University baseball team boarded a bus at their campus in Bluffton, Ohio. It was early evening, and the college students had a long night ahead of them—an 18-hour ride, punctuated only by bathroom breaks, fuel stops, and a planned breakfast at McDonald's. But their destination was enticing: Sarasota, Fla., which promised sunshine and the first game of their season.</p> <p>After an uneventful overnight drive, the bus stopped in Adairsville, Ga., to pick up a fresh driver, then headed south on I-75, eventually entering the HOV lane. As <a></a> the bus rolled closer to Atlanta, it neared the turn-off for Northside Drive,<a>*</a> the first of several left-hand HOV exits that dot that stretch of highway. The driver, Jerome Niemeyer, should have kept right where the road split, continuing toward Florida in the HOV through-lane. Instead, he took the left-hand exit ramp at highway speed, apparently mistaking it for a regular lane. At the ramp's end, he drove through a stop sign and four lanes of traffic before careening into a retaining wall and flipping onto the highway 19 feet below.</p> <p>The accident killed seven people—five of the Bluffton players, the bus driver, and his wife, Jean, who was along to keep him company. When the National Transportation Safety Board investigated, it <a href="">blamed the crash</a> in part on Georgia's failure to install adequate signs.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us we're on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, we're late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal.</p> <p>Bad signs can send perfectly ordinary citizens into spirals of obsession. Take <a href="">Richard Ankrom</a>, a Los Angeles artist who thought the junction of the 110 freeway and the 5 freeway was badly marked. In 2001, he put on an outfit that looked like the ones Caltrans highway workers wore, climbed up onto a freeway gantry, and mounted an aluminum sign he'd manufactured himself according to state specs. The sign stayed up for nine months without anyone noticing what he'd done; when the story leaked to the press and Caltrans finally cottoned on, the agency left the sign up for eight more years (eventually replacing it with one of their own that served the same function).</p> <p>Or consider Leslie Gallery Dilworth, a Philadelphia architect who took a road trip with her husband through Spain in the 1980s. Throughout the journey, they'd marveled at the simplicity of the European road signs, which were easy to use even though neither of them spoke Spanish. Upon their return to Philly, they got lost on the way from the airport to their house, when a bad set of signs directed them to a local dump. Dilworth was so struck by her own city's inhospitality that she spent much of the next decade working with the city and local stakeholders revamping Philadelphia's sign systems. Today, she's the CEO of the <a href="">Society for Environmental Graphic Design</a>, the premier American professional group for sign designers.</p> <p>Most people, when they think about it, can point to signs that have failed them: the hospital complex that felt like a labyrinth or the exit they always almost miss. But the truth is that signage today is far better than it's been at any other point in history. A century ago, sign design wasn't a profession to speak of; the signs that guided riders and pedestrians (there weren't many drivers yet) tended to be informal and ad hoc. As the automobile took off, the world found it needed traffic engineers, and it was these men and women who were the first to think seriously about sign systems. America put national standards for road signs in place in 1935.</p> <p>But the developers of office buildings, shopping malls, and other pedestrian spaces were slow to follow suit. Developers tended to assume that architects would take care of sign design, and many architects would leave it up to tenants. As a result, security guards and secretaries were often the ones to help orient the lost.</p> <p>The 1970s saw the first stirrings of revolution in the sign world. That's when the SEGD was founded, and it's when designers first began to seriously study how best to orient people and guide them through space. Their work was prompted in part by America's great urban thinkers: people like Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs, who argued that spaces should be designed not to fulfill the grand visions of architects but with humble human uses in mind. The field earned a name—&quot;wayfinding,&quot; a Lynch coinage—and today, people in the business call themselves wayfinding designers and talk about places that have &quot;good wayfinding&quot; or &quot;terrible wayfinding.&quot; By the 1980s and '90s, wayfinding advocates were involved in more development projects, but dispatches from the era have a slightly aggrieved air; designers of environmental graphics still often found themselves fighting for a place at the table. During the last 10 years, however, wayfinding has come into its own. More <a href="">requests for proposals</a> for major building initiatives now require bidders to explain how they'll handle wayfinding design. Many cities have installed wayfinding systems like the one Dilworth helped build in Philadelphia. New airports and train stations are routinely built with good navigation in mind.</p> <p>Why has there been such growth in the field? One cause is the remarkable pace of economic development over the past half-century. Developed countries have been building increasingly complicated spaces—shopping malls, multiplexes, convention centers, multi-terminal airports—that require good navigation systems in order for people to use them. In addition, businesses and municipalities alike have realized that well-oriented people are calmer, happier, and more likely to spend money (and plan return visits) than people who are lost. Investing in a good wayfinding system has real financial rewards.</p> <p>Another cause is our increasingly globalized planet. Much of the innovation in the sign world has been spurred by airports, places where people of all nationalities and tongues must move quickly, efficiently, and safely through huge spaces. For years, designers have been developing graphical symbols to help non-natives find the bathrooms, the baggage claims, and the <em>bureaux de change</em>, and, in the process, they've been inventing a global language, a kind of pictorial Esperanto.</p> <p>A third cause is our society's increasing inclusiveness. The 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act was the first piece of national legislation to mandate the accessibility of privately managed public spaces like hotels and universities. And because the law deals with visual as well as physical impairment, its <a href="">accessibility guidelines</a> require that <a href="">standards of legibility</a> be maintained in directional signs; they evolved to specify everything from the size of fonts to the contrast between lettering and its background. This development turned out to be as useful for the rest of us as it was for the legally blind.</p> <p>Finally, there's the fact that we have all increasingly become connoisseurs of good design. Fifty years ago, design belonged to designers. But the advent of the personal computer introduced us all to fonts, line spacing, and page layout, and machines from the photocopier to the iPhone have left us familiar with icons both clear and confusing. Navigating the Web has made us smarter about orienting ourselves in virtual space. As a result, when we see badly designed signs, we demand better. Joe Calderone, a spokesman for the Long Island Railroad, notes that the agency is not wanting for feedback: &quot;Our customers are not shy about telling us if things don't work.&quot;</p> <p>Ironically, just as our signs have improved, we've seen the advent of something that makes us less dependent on them than ever before: satellite navigation. Our iPhones and the GPS systems in our cars orient us in relation not to fixed squares of metal on our roads but to orbiting wheels of technology in the sky. Designers are confident that we'll always need signs—after all, you still need to know which street is Rogers when your car tells you to take it—but folks in the satellite business aren't so sure. By examining how signs have evolved and how they help us now, we can determine whether signage's golden age is ending or just beginning.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>Of course, the advances in the sign world don't mean that we live in a world devoid of bad signs. The Bluffton bus crash stands as evidence of that. Good sign systems require careful planning, consistent funding, and assiduous maintenance, all of which can be in short supply, especially in a recession.</p> <p>In the case of the Bluffton bus crash, the problem was actually a lack of signs. Left-side exits are unusual on American highways, and they're even more unusual on roads where the left lane is designated for high-occupancy vehicles. Typically, signs will announce a left exit well in advance. On I-75, though, the signs for the Northside exit never specified that it would appear on the left.</p> <p>In addition, there was a sign missing at the exit itself. When the exit was designed, the Georgia DOT intended to put up two signs side-by-side: one specifying the exit lane and one specifying the HOV through-lane. But when engineers set out to install the signs in the mid-1990s, they found the poles available would support just one. So they decided not to hang the through-lane sign at the exit turnoff.</p> <p>In the years that followed, the intersection was the site of two fatal crashes. And then, three years ago this week, Jerry Niemeyer mistook the Northside exit for a through-lane. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late to avert the crash.</p> <p>A subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board identified the bad signs as a primary cause of the crash. <a></a>In addition, the NTSB urged the Federal Highway Administration to revise the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices<a>*</a> (the handbook that lays down rules for signs on highways across the country) to mandate putting &quot;LEFT&quot; on all warning signs for HOV-only left exits, and pairing turnoff signs for such exits with signs indicating the pull-through lane whenever an exit might be confusing. Both recommendations were adopted into the revised MUTCD that was released last December.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>In the Atlanta crash, an unprecedented traffic pattern, insufficient guidance, and limited supplies contributed to the installation of the bad signs. What are some of the other factors that make good signs good and bad signs bad? Over the next few weeks, I'll be examining this question in a series of pieces. I'll start today with a tour of one of the most complicated signage environments in the United States: <a></a><a href="">New York's Penn Station</a>. On Thursday, I'll examine one wayfinder's effort to subdue London, a city so disorienting that its natives often keep the famous A to Z street atlases close at hand. I'll also be introducing readers to a British designer who's been studying homespun wayfinding design—the maps we nondesigners draw when we're trying to help one another get around—and asking you to submit your maps for his inspection. Next Monday, I'll examine America's emergency fire exit signs and explain why the rest of the world thinks they should be green instead of red. And a week from Thursday, I'll examine how the advent of satellite navigation devices may change the sign world forever.</p> <p><strong><em><strong><em>More from this series: Why the signs in <a></a><a href="">Penn Station</a> are so confusing; how smarter signs could make <a></a><a href="">London</a> easier to navigate; the international war over <a></a><a href="">the exit sign</a>; how GPS could <a></a><a href="">kill the sign</a>. Plus: Send Slate your <a></a><a href="">hand-drawn maps</a>.&nbsp;See more road signs in this Magnum Photos <a></a><a href="">gallery</a>.</em></strong></em></strong></p> <p><em><strong>Correction, <a></a> March 1, 2010: </strong>This article originally referred to Northside Drive as Northfield Avenue.<strong>&nbsp;</strong>(<a>Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p> <p><em><strong>Correction, <a></a> March 2, 2010: </strong>This article originally referred to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices as the Manual for Traffic Control Devices. (<a>Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p> <p><em><br /> </em><em></em></p> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:20:00 GMT Julia Turner 2010-03-01T19:20:00Z They're the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention. Life Signs: The most useful thing you pay no attention to. 2245644 Design Julia Turner Signs false false false Signs: The most useful thing you pay no attention to. Signs: The most useful thing you pay no attention to.