People don’t read. I worked for a long time at various service jobs, and the one thing that sticks out in my mind, as a design challenge, is that people just don’t read things. Could be the sign is there to prevent a loss of life or injury, but chances are it will forever go unread. At my office, we have some rules that were going to be enforced for the first time ever, and I took it upon myself to try and make some placards that would get noticed.
When you make a contract to design for a client, it’s an amazing feeling. You take a look at what you’ve got to do and break it down into steps, prioritize what needs to be done, and you SKETCH like mad! You come up with all kinds of fanciful ideas - then take a step back and look at it, analyzing it over and over - until you have something to show the client: your first proposal.
Shally lives 10,590.33km away from me, though that hasn’t always been the case. She and I have been together for more than 4 years, now. I kind of miss her a lot. I decided that I should put a picture of her next to me at work, on the wall - not anything ridiculously large, but a small reminder for me that she’s out there somewhere.
I had a photograph she sent me from her mobile phone that had some neat depth of field going on, so I decided to use that one and to make a funky fresh frame for it that would highlight the focal field of the photograph.
I work front-line support in an AV Help Desk at OCADU. I spend a lot of time in that room, and I have to answer a lot of questions; sometimes it’s the same question over and over. For example, faculty members frequently forget what classroom they are going to be in, so they will ask the Help Desk staff. Until things changed, we had no choice but to point to a grubby photocopy of a photocopy of a map that someone’d blown their nose into. It was time to use design and make things better!
As a designer, when presented with this type of information - a recurring circumstance or question - one must be awake enough to realize what is going on. It’s easy to be complacent and to just deal with things as they are, but good designers are always looking for behaviour patterns, repetitions and to observe how people act candidly - therein lie opportunities for design. In this case, it was obvious the map we had on the wall at the time sucked and needed replacement.
Here’s a cropped image of it:
My office services the 5th and 6th floors - the Sharp Centre for Design - at OCADU. As you can see, the map we had was a mess; it was full of writing between lines, arrows going all over the place, and text aligned every which way. The arrows, in particular, were puzzling to me; they added an extra step and the potential for confusion for someone trying to find something. Why not put the name of a place on that place?
The Sharp Centre has a very distinct colour scheme. Stairwells have yellow doors, elevators all have red floors, the bathrooms are different colours, classroom doors are green, the floor is concrete, and there are lockers in some hallways. I tried to use this to subconsciously remind users of what they were looking at when studying the map.
Rather than make it a plan view, I used an isometric layout and stacked the 5th and 6th floors on top of each other as they would be arranged in reality to further remind users of how their position in the Sharp Centre related to where they wanted to go. This, combined with the high-contrast colours, helped create a visually appealing and informative map that has made it easier for people using it to navigate around the Sharp Centre.
It was because I was aware enough to realize that there needed to be a new map, and also conscious that users do not like to dwell on text when they’re in a hurry, that I was able to conceive this map. Even though it hasn’t completely stymied questions about directions, it’s much more noticeable on the wall when we point to it and say, “if you know where your classroom is, there’s a map on the wall.”
This is Something Else, a website dedicated to the illustration, design and graphic arts of Alex Gornicki.
