Essential Reading
While there are many resources essential to those in the field of environmental graphic design, we suggest several books and movies by members and friends of SEGD as a good place to start building an EGD library.
Signs, Streets, and Storefronts:
A History of Architecture and Graphics along America's Commercial Corridors
By Martin Treu
Signs, Streets, and Storefronts presents an era by era account of the ever-changing face of Main Street and the strip—from modest colonial inn signs to neon extravaganzas, from crude wood-frame false fronts to slick, streamlined cinemas and shopping centers. A must-read for architects, city planners, town councils, sign designers, concerned citizens and anyone who cares about the appearance and vitality of America’s commercial streets, this heavily illustrated book is equally appealing to armchair historians, retro pop culture buffs, small-town enthusiasts, and lovers of Americana.
Designing Information: Human Factors and Common Sense in Information Design
By Joel Katz
"I read it and love it. I suggest you do the same." -
Richard Saul Wurman
The essential, full-color guide to understanding information design and how to make it better!
Featuring hundreds of full-color problems and examples, this comprehensive guide discusses and illustrates approaches to designing complex data and information for meaning, relevance, usability, and clarity. Described and analyzed in lucid text and over 500 illustrations, examples include successful, compromised, and failed designs covering everything from parking signs and road and statistical maps to explanations of the appropriate use of line, color, and form. The book provides incisive and useful insights into the process of visualizing complex information and communicating it in a simple, honest, and accessible form.
By Richard Poulin
Anyone trying to communicate in a new language must first gain a complete understanding of its fundamentals: the ABC's of that language-definitions, functions, and usage. The Language of Graphic Design provides graphic design students and practitioners with an in-depth understanding of the fundamental elements and principles of their language-graphic design-what they are, why they are important, and how to use them effectively. Organized by the building blocks of graphic design language, this reference includes work by some of the most successful and renowned practitioners from around the world, showing how they have applied these fundamental principles to their work. By examining both student and professional work, this comprehensive handbook is a meaningful, memorable, and inspiring reference tool for novice design students, as well as young designers starting their careers.
The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places
By David Gibson
A decade ago, the professional practice of wayfinding design simply involved devising sign systems. Today, the field is much broader and continues to expand to address technological developments – kinetic media, GPS systems, web connectivity, smart materials – as well as cultural changes in areas such as branding and environmental awareness. Similarly, a cross-disciplinary familiarity with graphic, architectural, landscape, interior, industrial, and information design has become an essential requirement of twenty-first-century wayfinding design. Professional wayfinding designer David Gibson draws on more than thirty years of experience to offer an insider’s view of this rapidly evolving discipline. Using real-life examples, Gibson illustrates the way type, color, mapmaking, dimensional forms, material selection, and new media are used to create effective wayfinding systems.
By Jan Lorenc and Lee Skolnick, with Craig Berger
A practical tool to unlock the mechanics of exhibition design and p
roduction, this is the ultimate guide to the many facets of this rapidly emerging discipline, from retail design to museums to trade shows – every field that applies graphic information to place and object.
This unrivalled handbook is a guide to the world of exhibition design, exploring what constitutes successful design and how it works. It clarifies the roles of the various design skills involved in exhibition design, and explores how new technology and materials expand the possibilities for both form and function. It also describes the tools and processes for design and manufacture, methods of prototyping, and means of transporting, assembling and dismantling exhibits.
What is Exhibition Design? provides a stunning, diverse portfolio of cutting-edge work from designers and studios around the world. Like the other titles in the Essential Design Handbooks series, this will be essential reading for every professional and student involved with exhibition design.
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.
Wayfinding: Designing and Implementing Graphic Navigational Systems
Sponsored by SEGD, Edited by Craig M. Berger with content contributions from the SEGD membership
As public spaces increase in number and complexity, people need to know where they are and where they are going. To bring clarity to confusion, graphic design is crucial and effective design of wayfinding systems must be a collaborative process.
Wayfinding (RotoVision/November 2005/$45.00 hardcover) is the ultimate guide for graphic designers, architects, landscape architects, industrial designers, and planners working in this field. Written by leading experts across a wide range of fields, Wayfinding reveals, through exciting illustrations and case studies, ways to incorporate logos, graphics, color, and type to relate a complete wayfinding system to the character of a city, exhibition, or other environment and successfully represent its unique qualities. Checklists of requirements and "tool kits" of elements provide a blueprint for developing successful and attractive wayfinding systems.
Every aspect is detailed: stakeholder groups; criteria of specific jobs; design elements; fabrication, installation and placement of signs and banners; and maintenance and management systems.
Official Signs & Icons 2 by Ultimate Symbol
By Mies Hora
4,811 standard symbols and signs designed by internationally recognized designers and organizations including the AIGA, SEGD, and DOT. 4-color casebound book, 8.75 x 11.25"; Alphabetical Index; This newly updated, expanded full-color hardcover edition is thoroughly researched, indexed and annotated with chapter intros, notes, bibliography, and resources. Chapters include: Hospitality Symbols, Safety Symbols Labeling, Transportation, Highway Signs (US and foreign), Recreational Parks Symbols, Signals Braille, Computer and Mechanical Labeling, Meteorological Symbols
Signage and Wayfinding Design: A Complete Guide to Creating Environmental Graphic Design Systems
by Chris Calori
Signage and Wayfinding Design is an essential reference for design professionals who must communicate meaningful information in the built environment. Written to be both comprehensive and accessible, this vital resource shows how to apply a holistic, proven design method to large and small signage projects in an efficient and systematic manner.
In this practical guide, author Chris Calori outlines her proven "Signage Pyramid" method. This approach divides signage into three interrelated focus areas and components-the Information Content System, the Graphic System, and the Hardware System-making it easier to solve the often complex design problems posed in a comprehensive signage program. Signage and Wayfinding Design gives professionals an in-depth view of the environmental graphic design (EGD) process from research and design development through project execution, and:
- Offers a wealth of illustrative examples from real-world projects
- Covers approaches to project documentation, including sign typing and message schedule management
- Explains nomenclature and numbering systems
- Illustrates how signage creates and reinforces brand identity
- Provides an overview of sign materials, coating, and finishes
- Highlights code and Americans with Disabilities Act considerations
- Includes more than 250 images and 32 pages of color images
By taking a cross-disciplinary approach, the author makes the information relevant for graphic designers, architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and industrial designers. Clients who engage EGD professionals will also gain valuable insights.
Wayshowing: A Guide to Environmental Signage Principles and Practices (Hardcover)
by Per Mollerup
Wayshowing presents a communication-based theory about wayshowing in general and signage in particular. The book introduces a set of practical rules based on the ways we normally use to navigate in unknown environments. The first part of the book connects practical experience with new theory and research.
The second part of the book presents examples of successful wayshowing dealing with airports, railways, hospitals, museums, and business buildings in several countries.
You Are Here: Graphics That Direct, Explain & Entertain
Edited by Leslie Gallery Dilworth and written by Gail Diebler Finke.
This is a compilation of winning environmental graphic design projects from the annual competitions sponsored by the Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD). The categories include business environments, healthcare and institutional environments, leisure facilities, retail and service environments, urban and temporary environments, educational and cultural environments, concepts and student works. You Are Here is a massive resource of over 400 full-color photos of more 100 award-winning environmental graphic design projects.
People, Signs, and Architecture
by Paul Arthur & Romedi Passini
This book brings together expertise on all three of the elements that comprise wayfinding within the context of the built environment:architecture, graphics, and verbal human interaction.
In other words, this book is not just about signs; it is about everything one needs to know in order to design settings that will be user-friendly and that will work the way they should - at least as far as the all-important communications aspects are concerned.
Readers will gain a better understanding of the wayfinding difficulties people have and why they have them; they will also discover what wayfinding is and how the process works through detailed examination of the architectural, graphic, aural, and tactile components involved in wayfinding design.
Wayfinding is, in effect, a prescription for a much-needed design discipline.
Wayfinding PictograficSystems: Nonverbal, Universal
by Paul Arthur and Branimir Zlamalik
ust as the world has adopted coordinated alphabet systems, the same should be done with pictorial images. Because no common descriptions exist, we are constantly exposed to different pictographic images representing the same thing. There is, however, a very real need for universality. A coordinated, integrated, pictograph system, with specific descriptions for each image, would be recognized throughout the entire world, regardless of language and culture. This type of system will achieve true internationalism.
PictograficSystems© contains over 570 pictographs and is possibly the largest resource of coordinated graphic symbols in the world. The research is still ongoing, and, eventually, thousands of pictographic images – representing common actions, services, objects or facilities – will be added.
By Jon Reiss
BOMB IT is the explosive new documentary from award-winning director Jon Reiss investigating the most subversive and controversial art form currently shaping international youth culture: graffiti.
Through interviews and guerilla footage of graffiti writers in action on 5 continents, BOMB IT tells the story of graffiti from its origins in prehistoric cave paintings thru its notorious explosion in New York City during the 70's and 80's, then follows the flames as they paint the globe. Featuring old school legends and current favorites such as Taki 183, Cornbread, Stay High 149, T-Kid, Cope 2, Zephyr, Revs, Os Gemeos, KET, Chino, Shepard Fairey, Revok, and Mear One. This cutting edge documentary tracks down today's most innovative and pervasive street artists as they battle for control over the urban visual landscape. You'll never look at public space the same way again.
BOMB IT has shot in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Tijuana, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Hamburg, Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, and Tokyo.
Environmental Graphics: Projects & Process
by Wayne Hunt
This important approach to signs provides a completely illustrated behind-the-scenes process of over thirty interesting assignments. Included are projects in the areas of Wayfinding, Placemaking and Interpretive Design. Each project is shown from sketch concept to final installation and includes a detailed design analysis.