subject: Exploring The Worldwide Controversy With Exit Signs [print this page] Depending on what business you are in, and even more broadly, what country you are in, the exit signs can all be different! While this may seem confusing and nonsensical, there is great controversy begin these pictures.
The classic American emergency exit sign-the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T-seems at first glance like an unimpeachable bit of sign design. The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like).
People in the rest of the world-at least the kind of people who spend time considering how to mark a means of emergency egress-think our simple red sign is completely nuts. Many other countries use some version of the ISO standard, a symbol developed the late 1970s by a Japanese designer named Yukio Ota and adopted for international use in 1985.
This take on the exit sign goes by the informal name "the running man." Fans of Ota's running man point to two key advantages: it is a pictogram, and it is green.
The sign's wordless means it can be understood even by people who don't speak the local language. In addition, the green color, they argue, just makes sense.
Green is the color of safety, a color that means go the world over. Red, on the other hand, most often means danger, alert, halt, and please do not touch.
Why confuse panicked evacuees with a sign that means right this way in a color that means stop? International designers tend to think our system is illogical and consider our rejection of the running man to be as dumb as our refusal to adopt that other sensible international norm, the metric system.
Are the running-man advocates right? This battle over the exit sign has been brewing for 25 years now, and the little green guy is slowly making inroads in the States.
However, to understand whether he should triumph, we must first understand America's skepticism toward pictograms and symbols, which have long been more popular in the rest of the world than they are here. American signs tend to be wordy.
In most places in the United States, it is safe to assume people speak English. As a result, our sign systems have typically communicated in text.
Europe, by contrast, developed symbolic road signs as early as 1968. On a continent where you cannot drive for more than a few hours before encountering a new language, the pictorial approach made sense.
The text-based American exit marker has its origins in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a blaze in a downtown Manhattan garment factory that killed 146 workers. Although signage was not primarily to blame for those fatalities-many factory doors were bolted shut in an effort to keep employees from slipping out-the exits were not clearly marked.
That massive loss of life spurred the National Fire Protection Association, which had been founded in 1896 by insurance companies to develop protocols for property preservation, to take up what it called "life safety": the business of getting people out of burning buildings intact. In the 1930s and '40s, the NFPA developed criteria for emergency-exit signage, evaluating contrast levels and testing different sizes and stroke widths for lettering, eventually publishing standards that were adopted by state and local governments across the land.
For the Mexico City Games in 1968, the American designer Lance Wyman introduced a system of pictograms so comprehensive the tickets were nearly text less. In the late '60s, British airports introduced a set of pictograms, some of which are still in use.
America made its first great pictographic strides in 1974, when the Department of Transportation collaborated with the AIGA-the largest national professional group for designers-to standardize a series of pictograms for use at terminals and stations throughout the United States. If you have ever wondered why there is a pipe in the common symbol for shops, wonder no more: the icon was designed in an era when people still smoked.
Although the AIGA-DOT symbol set is widely regarded as a first-rate group of pictograms, its exit sign was confusing and never caught on. And so the red "EXIT" marker rolled on.
Now, next time you see one those little red markers, you will know the controversy that still swirls around its universal appeal. Who knows-maybe your grandchildren will see an entirely different marker all together!
