Navigational Design

This post will be talk about navigational design. It means the design of The place I chose to write the post is Time Square. I've taken some pictures in Times Square with my really not so high-end 0.3 megapixels handphone, so please tolerate for the low quality pictures.

Well, this is a good sign due to its size. Everyone who walks pass it will certainly see it. The simple and clean design is easy to read. It stating the directions and where they lead to. And there is some icons beside those well-known places to indicate the floor number of it. These icons have 2 different color which is yellow and white. But the point is, I don't know the function of it. Which make it useless.

Here is a big problem of this sign. Can you see the people down there, at the lower right corner of this picture? they are so small, right? It means that the sign is too high. I mean who would look at that sign high up there? If you not finding the sign on purposely like me, you couldn't find it. So I guess you can say that this sign is not functioning.

This is quite a normal sign we can find in most of the shopping. It shows what is available at our right side. Instead of putting text in it, they put symbol that everyone familiar with to replace the text. The design is rather simple but they have use light in the background of those symbol to make it more readable.

This sign looks much alike as the sign above but is a bit confusing. See, three symbols of left side is showing the direction of straight ahead while the symbol of right side(lift) is showing the direction of left side. It would be better to put the symbol of lift at the left side since it suppose to be indicating left direction.

This sign can be found in front of the lift. Sometimes for a greater cause, the lift will be design like this to save cost, time and energy. Some of the lift will only available in certain floor. For example, the left lift will only available in odd number floor while the right lift will only available in even number floor.

This is the zoom in view of the picture of above. This is the floor plan of this floor. Its stated the position of the emergency exits, lifts, stairs, and etc. This is very important when emergency like fire occurs. It indicates your current position as well. But I just don't think its friendly enough because its all written in Malay Language. What about those foreign visitors? Since this building is located in KL and its one of the main attraction of travelers, they should expect that a lot of foreign visitors will come to this place. If people don't understand the language means its not functioning!

The location of this sign is still appropriate since the public will read it once they slightly raise their head. It indicates there are still some restaurant ahead and the name of the restaurant. The ceiling of this floor isn't very tall and its still in sight of walkers.

This directional sign is using a existing space which is the pillar in the mall. I think they put it here brilliantly because it save the cost to create a new stand for the sign. All the need it just the design and some stickers. Along the street is a corner of restaurant. At the quick glance we can see what restaurant ahead so we have in our mind and it helps us to make our choices for what we want to eat later.