{"id":3308,"date":"2025-08-25T20:57:32","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T20:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=3308"},"modified":"2025-08-25T20:57:32","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T20:57:32","slug":"a-case-for-better-signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/a-case-for-better-signs\/","title":{"rendered":"A case for better (environmental) signs"},"content":{"rendered":"

A former colleague, Stef Webb<\/a> is rightly obsessed with site notices<\/a>. I\u2019m obsessed with public signage about the natural world. Often terrible, temporary and inaccessible, they\u2019re an expression of our eco-anxiety, magical thinking and ambivalence about our place in the natural world. Here are some examples from my own walks and hikes in London of the kinds of signs we could improve on easily:<\/p>\n

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Too much text<\/strong>
\nOn my walk along Section 6 of the Capital Ring Walk<\/a>, this very busy A4 will tell you all about the Queensmere rewilding project<\/a> that is recreating a historic pond. It won’t surprise to hear they’ve been struggling. The sign was made by Wimbledon and Putney Commons<\/a> who are a charity and manage the land. I don’t know who would want to read it.<\/p>\n

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Comic Sans adjacent<\/strong>
\nThere’s a lot of hand written signs. I think it’s cute for a restaurant menu which changes weekly but for a \u00a31.2M London Wildlife Trust project<\/a>? Feels like an emerging form of ‘community washing’ for well-funded and thought through projects.<\/p>\n

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Bad Word Templates
\n<\/strong>Another example from Wimbledon & Putney Common is next. This sign makes it hard to understand what the call to action is because there are two to three. And something that lasts 6 months of the year every year deserves more than a laminated A4.\u00a0 A no dogs swimming sign<\/a> with dates below it would be nice and more visually understandable.<\/p>\n

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This last example was stapled to an unhappy looking tree 5 minutes from my flat. This is a notice so it should really say ‘Tree Removal Notice’ and the copy could do with focusing on the time frame but I’m not even sure that’s the focus. The poor quality paper makes this quite a sad eulogy for a tree too.<\/p>\n

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By making crappy signs, we’re saying climate change isn’t worthy of our formal, institutional attention. When we give up on a strong national story about mitigating the effects of climate change<\/a>, we end up giving climate communication to charities, local authorities and community projects. We fragment an important national and global project. I would love to see a working group in Central Government (perhaps as part of the\u00a0future Government Office for Green Spaces<\/a> or DEFRA<\/a> ) develop some environmental symbols<\/a> with ecologists and graphic designers. Our children deserve better signs and better calls to action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A former colleague, Stef Webb is rightly obsessed with site notices. I\u2019m obsessed with public signage about the natural world. Often terrible, temporary and inaccessible, they\u2019re an expression of our eco-anxiety, magical thinking and ambivalence about our place in the natural world. Here are some examples from my own walks and hikes in London of… Continue reading A case for better (environmental) signs<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sustainability","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-Rm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3314,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3308\/revisions\/3314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}