BOOKS
THE WAYFINDING HANDBOOK: INFORMATION
DESIGN FOR PUBLIC PLACES
By David Gibson
Princeton Architectural Press, 152 pp., $24.95
Every time I go to the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, the same thing happens: Once
I’m on the second floor, I get mixed up trying
to get back down to the ground floor. Other
museumgoers get similarly disoriented; they
circle around the second-floor escalator bank
assuming the route continues to the bottom.
When they realize it doesn’t, they turn around
and get stuck walking against the flow of
traffic. It’s a classic wayfinding debacle—poor
circulation combined with a lack of signage
what matters now in design publishing
Museums are hardly the only places that
require well-designed directional signage.
Transportation systems, stadiums, hospitals,
and schools are all much happier places when
supplied with good environmental graphics.
David Gibson’s The Wayfinding Handbook: Infor-
mation Design for Public Places aims to introduce
a generation of students and professionals
to the best practices in the field, which Gibson
mastered during his nearly 30 years as found-
ing partner at the identity and information
design firm Two Twelve Associates.
The Wayfinding Handbook is meant to serve
as a reader-friendly guide to this practice.
Many of the book’s examples come from Gib-
son’s own work on directional systems for
downtown Baltimore, the Children’s Hospi-
tal in Boston, Yale University, Rockefeller
Center, Radio City Music Hall, and the city of
Charlotte. The book also surveys projects by
well-known firms such as Vignelli Associates,
Pentagram, Sussman/Prejza & Co., Poulin +
Morris, and Bruce Mau Design, though the
credits are mostly hidden in the fine print in
the back. Unlike the more visually stimulating
Wayfinding: Designing and Implementing Graphic
Navigational Systems (Rotovision, 2005), the Hand-
book is not filled with splashy illustrations,
but instead aims to thoroughly verse readers in
the processes and tools involved in informa-
tional design for public places.
This is decidedly not a picture book. The
Handbook reads, to a large extent, like a textbook.
Dutiful charts of the platoon of stakeholders
who shaped various types of environmental
graphics projects, for instance, are probably
more information than the beginning student
or the casual reader needs to have. On the
other hand, the analysis of techniques used to
organize data for large-scale wayfinding proj-
ects will be invaluable for newcomers. One-page
essays by specialists like Jonathan Hoefler on
typography and Jack and Gay Reineck on special-
purpose maps add diversity and particularity
to the sometimes generic text. The page-long
essays also point to the fact that, though pro-
fessional specializations are becoming more
minutely focused nowadays, that same focus
also requires an unprecedented degree of inter-
by Stephen Zacks
disciplinary cooperation to integrate each
branch of specialized knowledge.
The real heart of the handbook is the
chapter on the tools of wayfinding design,
which fluidly weaves together descriptions of
historical and contemporary practices with
illustrations to suggest the dynamic creative
possibilities of the field. Discussions of Tiffany
& Co. packaging, Burma-Shave highway
signs of the 1930s, Apple store branding, 19th-
century commercial storefronts, Berlin subway
signs, Japanese information symbols, and
axonometric maps reveal the wide variety of
imaginative visual tools at the designer’s dis-
posal. Many of the examples appear all the
more clever for being so intuitive that they are
hardly noticed: When I was in Berlin, I was
able to navigate the transit system for two full
weeks without thinking once about direc-
tional signage, but seeing a picture of a crisp,
clear blue-and-white sign for the U7 stop at
Hermannplatz evoked a wave of recognition
and appreciation.
The last time I was at MoMA, museum
officials had placed a metal stand next to the
second-floor escalators. The sign displayed
a sheet of paper emblazoned with the word
“EXI T” and an arrow pointing to the stairs.
Visitors were still consistently going in the
wrong direction, yet just a little signage would
have helped many people avoid a frustrating
architectural experience. This book should
point the way, as it were, for better solutions
in the future.
STEPHEN ZACKS is a contributor to The New York Times,
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