Francois Botha - Entrepreneur, Soldier & Soothsayer » Blog

Leading the way with Wayfinding

Fran — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:49:05 +0000

Wayfinding has been defined as all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. The term might have been coined by urban planner, Kevin A. Lynch for his book Image of the City (1960), however the real part that interest me has to be Waysigning. My term for the signs & symbols that guide us to find our way. This art has been perfected by some amazing Waysigners. Companies like Mijksenaar really excel at getting into the human psyche and figuring out how we find our way.

In my mind though Wayfinding is not only limited to navigating places, but also instructions for objects. Here are some examples of instructional design by Paul Mijksenaar. Getting into the Synoptic and Discrete Sequences is a whole different topic for future discussion.

Here are some of my own shots of the excellent Waysigning that has been implemented in the British Museum. I think the reason I love this so much is because it goes hand-in-hand with another design discipline that I find fascinating, ‘Museum Design’.

After writing this post, I drove past the new Greenpoint Stadium in Cape Town, which truly is an architectural marvel. The stadium is very minimalist, and the Waysigning has been done in a similar way. I am not convinced that their choices of colour etc are necessarily the most impactful, as many of the signs simply get lost. If they followed the theory in Architectural Signing and Graphics, Follis & Hammer 1979, they would have known that their black signs would have to be 225% the size of the same sign in white to be as conspicuous. In other words, Yellow signs would have been much better at the small sizes.

Wayfinding – Part science, part art, and just a little magic.
Francois Botha, 2010

Finding inspiration first-hand

Fran — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:34:45 +0000

In a new move this year I have decided to find more inspiration from the things I experience first-hand every day. I believe that with the access to vast resources we have these days, the first thing we do when we need inspiration is head online to one of our trusty resources. We do this almost to the extent where we live our own lives by proxy.

To start this off, here are some shots of things which inspired me on my recent trip to the UK.

Late Start to P52

Fran — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:10:03 +0000

This morning I’m inspired by Project 52. I have always found it tricky to keep to a posting schedule, however this year I’m determined to wing it. I think a lot of the success of this project could lie in the support we could lend to one another and in doing so acting as a global motivational group.

Back!

Fran — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:22:38 +0000

Back onto the awesome new WordPress 2.9.1. Faith has been restored, now only old posts that await restoring.

Bear with me.