Health Business

Despite her environmental credentials being conspicuously at odds with the world of today, I was - and remain - a huge fan of the Concorde. I actually got to fly on her twice; once through necessity, when it was a question of swallowing hard and paying for a ticket, and once as the lucky recipient of the mother of all upgrades.
    
The Concorde stirred up a real amalgam of emotions. Patriotism, awe, or just that hard to pin-down feeling you get when you look at something that’s undeniably beautiful. I think it’s all the more remarkable that Concorde’s lines were dictated by the functional aspects of her role as an aircraft – she looked the way she looked because she had to. A case of form following function, and in this instance at least, achieving an aesthetically flawless and uplifting conclusion in the process.
    
It’s unfortunate that Concorde’s antitheses, at least in the case of her beauty, are all too common. We’re routinely assaulted by things around us that occupy one of two extremes; they’re either over-designed, or they’re not designed at all. I find this especially irritating when the deficient subject is a wayfinding scheme.

Wrong place, right time
Recently, I found myself in a French doctor’s waiting room. I’d chosen to go on a day when the ‘take-your-chances’ scheme was in operation. You arrive, without having first made an appointment, take your seat with legions of other hopefuls, and you wait your turn. I’d been in the waiting room for at least two hours before I realised, thanks to an overheard conversation, that I was in the wrong place. I was, when I arrived, motioned towards the room by a vague gesture from the receptionist and I did as I was told. When I later registered a mild protest, I was told there was a sign on the waiting room door. Indeed there was. But when the door’s open, as it tends to be in thirty-five degree heat, the sign is up against a wall and can’t be seen.
    
Did I say sign? What I meant to say was ‘nasty piece of work’. The alleged sign, informing the sick and unwashed masses in the waiting room was set on one of those vintage, angular quadrilaterals, that may have looked wickedly racy in the fifties, but really jars with its total incongruence today. It was decked with little wooden letters almost as thick as their x-height. Pretty near indecipherable, unless your viewpoint was square-on.
    
I’ve always thought of wayfinding as a real specialisation within the scope of signing overall. It’s a specialisation that’s really dangerous to dabble in whether you’re the manufacturer of the components comprising a way-finding system, or the practitioner who installs them. You have to be really into it, to do it at all well. There are so many factors the end product needs to satisfy and letting any one of them dominate, at the expense of another, leaves you with the ruin of a wayfinding scheme to deal with.

The need to adapt
Signs that relate to generally static chunks of infrastructure, such as Manchester or Exeter, have a life span that’s largely a function of the materials they’re made from. When the weather has done its work, the sign will be replaced, in all likelihood with something pretty much identical. That’s because, unless something really unusual happens, Manchester and Exeter will always be where they are now.
 
Most wayfinding schemes though, usually point the way to things that are anything but static. People get promoted. Radiology gets a new machine and moves to a bigger room. A new MD is installed and he’s a sales driven animal, so finance is consigned to a new home in a Portacabin by the bins. A wayfinding scheme has to be ‘updatable’ to reflect these changes.
    
I was given to believe that there are 40 shades of green. Try telling that to whoever was responsible for the directory in a Bristol department store I visited. Every little component in the system had been stove enamelled, or painted, in a shade of green close, but not close enough, to its neighbour. Every time a change was made, a new shade of green would find its way into the directory. Eventually, it lost its way completely. Cratered aesthetics!
    
How about the provincial theatre that signed up for wayfinding “in character”? No room here for the crisply rendered, get-it-at-a-glace quality of a sharply contrasting sans-serif face and unmistakeable din-standard arrows. Try brown lettering on gold anodised aluminium and, as if that’s not enough, make sure the lettering is Olde English and forget that it has a lower case too. Cratered legibility!
    
Old school NHS - acres of brown Darvic. Cratered functionality!

Learning from other industries
Thankfully, wayfinding done well is an absolute joy to behold and there’s quite a bit of it around. Airports, on the whole, get it right. Airports spend a small fortune on signing because they’re in the business of herding people from one place to another and – their system would simply grind to an excruciating halt if they didn’t do it well.
    
The British road traffic signing scheme is just about the best in the world and, let’s face it, we get plenty of time to admire it at close quarters. You can’t talk wayfinding and transport without mentioning the London Underground. Its wayfinding scheme is an exemplar of best practice in signing and, in its way, a thing of beauty too.
    
Wayfinding done well is a deep design specialisation. It draws upon knowledge of how type works and how things distilled to the barest essence actually function. The very fact that it’s not a discretionary involvement of the user with the sign, but something closer to necessity, confers upon it a responsibility to do its job and to do it well.
    
No one goal in wayfinding is seconded to another. Whether the scheme sets out to counterpoint the architecture that’s its host, or to work with it, it must do so in a manner that sits comfortably with its need to direct and inform. Give legibility its head though, and you may have won in the functional stakes, but you’ll also have blighted the venue with the aesthetics of a car crash.

This article was first published in Sign Directions, official magazine of the British Sign and Graphics Association.  

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