SIGNS OF
HEN was the last time you couldn't find a hotel's toilets, or the entrance to a bar? The reason is sometimes bad planning and layout. But it's often a case of bad signage.
Signage, being any item that instructs or directs people, covers everything from fire exits to toilets, as well as the name of the bar, café or hotel, presented in such a way as to entice people in. It can be used to build brand awareness or as a marketing tool.
One thing that marks this field is an almost universal lack of imagination. The tendency is to think in terms of two dimensions only, and to copy what has been seen elsewhere. The result is a proliferation of plain, plastic signage in varying typography.
John Mather at Trevillion Interiors says that his company, in an effort to find an exciting signage solution, commissioned four signage firms to come up with an innovative new range. "As yet, not one of them has come back to us," says Mather.
It's not just the fault of the sign companies. Often clients - especially hotel clients - prefer to play safe.
Harrow-based Ferro Design has come up with what it considers a new approach to meet modern requirements - a co-ordinated signage system aimed mainly at catering operations. It comprises a flexible frame with moving components that can be fitted into an outer frame carrying corporate branding and other messages (see right). Ferro's creative design director, Fergus Stapleton, says: "Signage is usually a case of piecemeal, disparate elements. This is our response."
There is an argument that toilet symbols should be, literally, "bog standard" - no point in leading men into the ladies' loos for the sake of inventive design.
Admittedly, when the designers of Bar Rumba in London, Torres Design Associates, who painted dancing, amorphous blobs over the walls of the bar, denoted the loos with a male and a female blob, some confusion arose. To anyone sober, it is obvious that the male blob has an appendage. But this is a bar, and the clientele may have a little difficulty at the end of the evening.
Glasgow-based Graven Images managed to combine clarity and innovation when it designed the interior for the Living Room, a modern rustic bar in Glasgow that makes a feature of tangled rope, rust-coloured flock wallpaper and rough-hewn wrought ironwork.
The letters M and F were twisted out of baler twine and bits of wool, and tacked onto the loo doors with rusted nails - a solution that is perfectly clear, completely in keeping with the decor, and costs almost nothing.
Design integrity tends to go out of the window when it comes to these final touches. But there's no reason why it should. Inspiration for something a little different, or more relevant, can often be found right on your doorstep.
Ross Hunter at Graven Images tries to use local materials when planning signage for the company's many diverse jobs. A brewery visitor centre he designed for United Distillers on the Isle of Isla featured various combinations of local stone, slate and copper.
Tim Greenhalgh, design director at RSCG Conran Design, chose limestone, water etched, for the base material when working on proposals for a hotel in Malta - an area where limestone is plentiful.
Hunter thinks there is plenty of scope for imagination. "You can work on a variety of different planes so that, as you move past the sign, it changes."
You don't even have to do anything as mundane as signalling "entrance". The entrance of dell'Ugo, in London's Soho, is unmistakeable, as a giant sculpture of a man's head looms over the top of it.
And at the Car Wash, a 1970s-inspired pub in Edinburgh, a huge, pink, fibre-glass T-bird protrudes through the wall by the door.
Signage should be viewed as a form of branding, accorded as much care as the colour of seats and flooring. When done well, it is regarded as the epitome of style - take, for example, the amount of comment generated by the care Conran took over Quaglino's, from door handles to ashtrays.
For restaurants, it is a lot easier to be quirky and individualistic. Hotels are a different ball game. Peter Inston, whose design company is finishing off the Churchill Intercontinental and working on the Athenaeum hotel in London, feels that hotel signage can simply be tasteful or tasteless - the heights and depths of excitement are rarely reached.
This is mostly down to the clients' conservative preferences. As far as most hotel groups are concerned, good signage is signage that you don't notice unless you are looking for directions.
Greenhalgh says: "I have a particular aversion to hotel signage because it always makes a hotel look more like a conference centre. What is the point in creating temporary, flexible signs for the bar when the bar isn't going to move?
"There is also a lot of superfluous signage. There should be no need to sign the lifts. Their whereabouts should be explicit from the floor design. And is there any reason to have a huge sign saying ‘reception' when it's a huge desk by the entrance with three people standing behind it?"
Greenhalgh likes signage with a feeling of permanence about it - room numbers engraved into the wood above the door, for example.
Also working on new presentation in hotels is the Guildford-based Ransley Group, which has its own graphics department working alongside the interior design team. Graphics director Martin Dedman sees it as his mission to bring life to the dull subject of signage.
At the Copthorne Hotel in Hannover, Germany, Dedman has introduced directional signs supported by a statue or two. He has also introduced laminated signs in preference to the more traditional brass lettering on wood.
The digital age has made inroads, with some hotels adopting an electronic message board system which relays information to guests. At the Mount Royal hotel, near Marble Arch, London, interior design company Trevillion specified a moving message system linked to a computer in the manager's office and a visual display screen. Trevillion bought the basic components but customised the frame in chrome, with bronze lettering.
"It's infinitely better than felt or plastic letters on a grooved board," comments designer John Mather. "And it also works well in the Mount Royal entrance, whichis a floor below the lobby. It flashes up a welcome and invites people upthe stairs, while telling them which rooms the functions are in."
One recent convert to the idea of building brand awareness through signage is Whitbread.
Most of us are familiar with a strip of neon shouting Budweiser from bar windows; Whitbread will have its key brands etched into vitreous enamel plaques, using plenty of neon, stretching right across the company's estate of pubs, clubs and restaurants. o
SIGNAGE PEOPLE
Rivermeade Signs, hotel signs to designers' specifications: 0494 459011.
Signs by Design, manufacturer and importer of glass-backed/fronted signage from Italy: 0895 440381.
Keith Bailey, heraldic and architectural carving and sculpture: 0223 311870.
Big Ben Interiors, wood-based signs, aged and distressed and memorabilia:0904 488880.
Brass Tacks Hardware, lettering in brass, aluminium or stainless steel: 081-566 9669.
David Dewey, heraldry, logos, symbols and sundials, carved, incised and coloured: 0279 842410.
Bryant Fedden, letter-cutting on stone, slate and wood, sculpture and glass engraving: 0594 822554.
David Kindersley, lettering in all materials; computer text-setting, book plates and type design: 0223 62170.
Signbox, cut-out lettering from stainless steel, aluminium, laminates, acrylic and polystyrene: 0784 438688.
John Skelton, lettering in all media for murals, shop and company signs: 0273 890491.
Paul Wehrle, letter-cutting and carving in stone, wood and metal: 0444 244361.
Nobo Visual Aids, electronic message panels: 0323 641521.
AGS Signs, neon signage: 081-953 4191.
The HB Sign Company: 071-581 8044.
