Hi, I’m Kim, one of the designers here at Smith. I’ve been with the company for just over nine months now (which has absolutely flown) and I’ve worked on some really interesting and exciting projects. I’m not here to talk about me though; in this blog post I’d like to talk about something that really hones in on one of the reasons that I became a designer, and that topic is the very power of design.
The Ordinary Everyday
It might sound cliché but as a designer you tend to notice everything around you that has been designed. Literally everything around you has been thought through, engineered, designed and created for whatever purpose it serves. Sometimes to me the most fascinating design is ubiquitous, so everyday, ever present and useful that we all take it for granted. Look around you and consider it – your keyboard and mouse, the rug on the floor, the door handle or the type of chair you’re currently sitting in – someone took their time to think that through and design it.
There are many examples of this but the one that stands out the most to me is the UK road signage system, something that millions of people use on a daily basis to navigate around the country without really thinking about it. Designed by two designers from London, Jock Kinneir & Margaret Calvert, the system uses minimal parts to best convey information quickly, such as limited colours, two typefaces and primarily three common shapes.
A System For the Masses
The decision to overhaul the UK’s road signage system came in the 1960s, prompted by the opening of the first section of motorway (the Preston By-pass, now part of the M6) and coinciding with the gradual rise of car ownership. Prior to this the UK had an array of different styles of signage, but the most common signs were found to be difficult to interpret at speed, leaving drivers without the vital information they needed to travel safely. Many of the old signs used a shape at the top, followed by a pictogram and a message, meaning drivers and pedestrians alike had to quickly take in three lots of information.
Standardising the system meant that, regardless of where in the country you were, you’d be able to move around confidently and with ease. One of the most effective changes was the decision to change the majority of typography from uppercase to sentence case, making each sign more legible at speed, as the letters are more easily recognised as distinct shapes. The system also follows principles that are already present in how we interact with certain things in our daily lives, such as the use of a triangle to signify warnings and alert drivers, or the use of a circle (with a red outline) to signify when something is prohibited.
Ingrained Associations
These signs and symbols had been in use for decades in the workplace, before being introduced to the signage system. Take, for example, a wet floor sign – what do you think of? I’d bet you’ve thought of a yellow triangle. This is the power of association. This power comes into play when, in a crisis situation, being able to interpret something as quickly and comprehensively as possible can make all the difference and potentially save lives.
This connection to colours and shapes has been long ingrained into our society. Take for example when we need to be alert to something it’s usually shown in red, or when we think of the colour green it’s a positive, such as in this instance a green traffic light enabling movement. We’ve previously touched on the topic of colour theory in our Thursday Finds series (head over to our Instagram or LinkedIn to read the latest) but this topic could be a whole blog post in itself – I’ll leave that one for Matthew!
Asking the Right Questions
I am fascinated by these ideas as they all relate well to what we do on a daily basis here at Smith. When we start a project, whether that’s branding, designing a website or tackling a client brief, it’s important to delve deep and discover the core values of that client and distil those into their most direct and understandable forms. We have to ask the right questions and get to the heart of the problem we’re trying to solve. When Kinneir began this project he too looked at it from the client’s perspective, in this case the road-user, and asked the question “What do I want to know, trying to read a sign at speed?”
Questions that we’d ask today could easily have been asked in 1964 during the initial stages of the signage project: does the outcome say what it needs to in a clear way, does it communicate what we intended it to, does it demonstrate what the product or service is about? All whilst considering the end-user or the customer viewpoint.
Clarity Cuts Through
I think what I really love about this system is that, just as with good branding or good design, it makes the output easier to understand, quicker to navigate, and although you might not think about it as much as I have, it’s definitely memorable. I bet you can picture a few road signs even if you’re not a driver yourself! Essentially Kinneir and Calvert created a timeless universal language, communicating through pictograms, shapes and colours. They distilled a visual problem into the simplest elements, proving that clarity cuts through.
So whilst we might not be saving lives here at Smith (or maybe we are?!) there’s certainly a whole lot of merit to good, well thought-out design, something we aim to achieve for all of our clients. I hope that if anything, this opens your eyes to appreciating the good everyday ubiquitous design that serves its purpose without us really having to think twice about it. Design, it’s powerful stuff!
Photos courtesy of Wikipedia & Getty Images.