On Oct 8, 2008, at 8:36 PM, William Conger wrote:
I will admit to being highly critical of much public signage. For example the ubiquitous crosswalk signs show a hand for stop and a genderless striding humanoid for walk. But this striding humanoid has no feet or hands. If a hand signifies stop, why not a foot for walk? Re the stick figure within a tiangular "skirt" for women's lavatory, it is plenty sexist since it seems that the majority of women entering those lavatorys are not wearing skirts. Are they violators?
The paramount issue is non-ambiguity in pictograms, without using written words, to be understood by people who don't read the main language. The man and woman bathroom symbols are completely unambiguous. The charge of sexism (the skirt shape) is hard to maintain because the purpose is to show the two figures in clear differentiation. Short of anatomically clear drawings (like on the plaque on intergalactic space probes), makes that distinction so effectively? The Mars and Venus symbols fall back on being read as language rather than as pictograms. All of us knows what is being signified, and those who don't (mostly small children) learn it as a simple two-part system. Likewise the hand and striding figure. These signs are mostly meant to be quickly read without error, even though the two symbols aren't precisely parallel.
Public signage, from highway signs to lavatory door signs, is an important small discipline within graphic design and typography. A lot of people devote a lot of time to such things as legibility at speed, clarity of pictograms, use of written words or letters (cf. the white H on a blue background for Hospital, but the airplane silhouette for Airport, or the words "Merge Left" compared to the diagram of the right lane slanting into the left), colors, etc.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
