Part of what I am (or at least, will be) learning in my Masters in Information Design at the University of Reading is ‘wayfinding’. Yes, signs. Surely, you might ask, that’s some­thing that town plan­ners, archi­tects, etc take care of?

Well, they can if they want, but if you want the job done prop­erly, you might think about getting an inform­a­tion or wayfinding designer in for that!

I saw these at the London School of Economics, and thought they were amazing — the way they work with the walls and street lines and guide your eye and feet in the right direc­tion is very cool.

If I were to change it, I might add the func­tion of those build­ings to the sign, or replace the building names with the func­tions. It took me a fair bit of googling to find out the Lionel Robbins building was the library.

Inside the library was another matter, though. Got told off for standing on the wrong side of the queue barrier, when all the signs were facing towards me… I grumbled a bit and turned the signs inward as I went, so hope­fully other people won’t have that problem. Sometimes it just takes a small adjust­ment to fix your inform­a­tion flow.

Anyway, that’s just one of the things Information Design is about.