Road Signs

We see them every day and take them for granted: our road signs.

They are perfect examples of well-designed, visual instructions. And to be read and understood at a glance.

I found this article again at my dentist and tore out the page from a Readers Digest. It describes the work of typographer Jock Kinneir and art student Margaret Calvert, from initial motorway signage in 1957 to eventual completion of all road signs in 1964.

Next time you’re out and about, have a little closer look at the road signs and marvel at their simplicity and clarity.

How to ski

Back in 1947, champion French downhill skier Emile Allais and photographer Pierre Boucher teamed up to produce this highly innovative instructional book on skiing techniques (“How to ski by the French method: Emile Allais technic” )

Just a few years ago José de Souza used this example in his PhD on visual instructional techniques. Visit his website to see more examples (http://publish.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/how-to-ski/#comment-1179).

Apparently this is quite a classic and copies can go for as much as £700 in antique bookshops.
Notice how the background has been cut out, predating the Dorling Kindersley method,  in order to reduce visual noise and accent the signal. Also note how the images and annotations work well together.

Celebrity Target Map

A Target Map is a pretty simple visual tool. It’s a kind of Bulls Eye, with radiating levels of relevance, accuracy or, in this case, celebrity. Here, celebrities are distributed in relation to the centre according to their rank in the world of fame.

You could equally choose to categorise these distinctions, as newspapers do, with A listers, B listers and so on. Your Target Map might have corresponding circles, perhaps colour–coded, to represent these hierarchies.

This Target Map comes from the Entertainment Weekly magazine (I tore the page from my dentist’s pile of reading matter).

Let’s Twist Again

Here’s a good example of an attractive but poor visual instruction. Of course depicting a series of movements on paper is difficult but this is very misleading. 

Examine the red dashed arrowed lines. They are supposed to represent movement. But in image A, the verbal instructions simply tell you to “stand with feet hip width apart and feel the rhythm of the music”. In which case, what does that red dashed line indicate? Nothing at all.
Later in image B, the two red dashed lines indicate some sort of movement “moving one foot out, then switching feet”.

Yet only on the subsequent image C, is this foot action described “act as if you are squashing a bug on the floor”.  And what on earth is that straight dashed line meant to indicate? I think that it, along with the first line in image A, should not have been dashed. Dashed lines seem to show movement whereas these seem merely to point.

So The Guardian graphics department doesn’t get it right every time, eh?

Reference: The Guardian Weekend, 4 June 2011.

Home-made Instructions

Infographics needn’t be sophisticated digital art forms. Take this rough–and–ready set of visual instructions. It was designed for a blog author’s mother who rarely used a mobile phone but needed to know how to do so in emergencies.

As you can see by the annotations, it’s been road–tested. A wonderful example of a personalised visual instruction plan. 

Read the original story at http://qwertyrob.blogspot.com/.