Month: January 2012

There’s been a lot of commentary about Decatur’s wayfinding signs around the city since they were installed a couple years ago.

A lot of it has been about the “look” and placement of the signs themselves, but not much has been said about the overall effectiveness of the program itself.

As a recent post on the Atlantic Cities blog notes, creating a successful wayfinding system is actually quite complex to implement properly.

“Architectural signage and wayfinding isn’t about building a nicely designed sign,” says Sue Labouvie, one such expert whom we tapped to explain the science of helping us find our way in the city. “It’s about the information content and the analysis of the space or place that you’re trying to move people through, and coming up with a strategy of how you make this big complex thing simple and understandable to the user.”

How do you clarify to people what a city is about, how they should move through it and where they can find all the really important stuff? Or, put another way: How does a city do this, all on its own, so that I don’t have to ask a knowledgeable-seeming stranger on the street for directions?

Philadelphia divided its downtown into five different color-coded sections on their street maps.  New Orleans signage allows for multiple lines of text to describe a destination.

With that in mind, how successful do you believe Decatur’s wayfinding system has been?  And more importantly if you see room for improvement, what could be done to build off of Decatur’s current wayfinding signage?

Are there urban elements of Decatur that are still intuitive to the average pedestrian?  We don’t have a church at the top of a hill, but we have the Old Courthouse.  Would color-coding the city help visitors find their way around?  Should chosen destinations have more prominent signage of their own?

Photo courtesy of City of Decatur’s website