Blog - David Kopulos

A logo for my elementary school's centennial

2013-03-09T17:35:00.000-05:00

Here's a design I just completed for a logo contest for my elementary school's centennial:

The basic shape, colours, and some of the symbols were inspired by the school crest:

What do you think? Do we have a winner?

Wayfinding-inspired branding for Madrid Street Art

2013-01-22T11:26:00.000-05:00

This fantastic branding project for the Madrid Street Art initiative by IS Creative Studio makes use of the vocabulary of wayfinding (arrows, maps) to great effect. The designers created a great method for encouraging participation in the branding process: give away rolls of wayfinding tape and allow anyone to show the way to what they consider to be worthy street art:

European Star Trek-ish logos

2013-01-15T18:43:00.000-05:00

The typeface created in the 1980s for Star Trek: The Next Generation was long ago converted by a fan into a free font available online. The following businesses (spotted during a 2012 trip to Europe) may have missed the memo that what works on a sci-fi show may not be the best (or most legal) choice for their own, ahem, enterprise:

Bonus: this shop managed to 'borrow' more than one famous brand identity:

Straight ahead: the wayfinder's dilemna

2013-01-08T18:25:00.000-05:00

You're in an airport, looking for the washroom. The nearby sign features the familiar man/woman pictogram image, with an arrow pointing down. Is the washroom straight ahead? Or behind you? Or directly underneath the sign?

The accepted practice is to use the 'up' arrow for destinations ahead, or the 'down' arrow when the sign is above eye level and the 'up' arrow when the sign is below eye level. But what if the destination is behind you? Just avoid placing a sign in that location.

Underground transit stations are tricky; your destination is just as likely to upstairs as straight ahead. The solution devised by the usually design-impaired Toronto Transit Commission? 3D arrows! Appearing only at North York Centre station, these eye level signs employ a novel approach to communicating 'straight ahead' that doubtlessly leave design purists cringing:

What do you think? Unambiguous, ugly, or both?

Well-behaved logos, bad camps, and dangerous desire

2013-01-01T18:06:00.002-05:00

A grab bag of links from 2012, in no particular order:

Keeping it consistent

Ever wonder how big organizations -- from Starbucks to Skype -- manage to maintain a consistent brand, with so many employees itching to mess with the corporate logo in Word or PowerPoint? It doesn't happen by accident. Brand style guides are developed along with the logo; they stipulate colours, buffer areas around logos, approved background images, and much more. Here are the style guides from some major brands: logodesignlove.com/brand-identity-style-guides

"Refugee camps not designed for refugees"

A touch of environmental design creativity could enliven many temporary UN camps, most of which lack community hubs, work opportunities, and are arranged with an eye to modular efficiency rather than sociability: dw.de/refugee-camps-not-designed-for-refugees/a-16293384-1

Desire lines

Within weeks of a new park opening, muddy paths cut across fields and through gardens, putting the landscape architects to shame and showing where people really want to walk. These unauthorized trails are manifestations of desire lines: the trails people blaze, paths notwithstanding, that usually mark the shortest distance between two points. If you want to build walkways that follow desire lines instead of forcing walkers out of their way, wait for the first snow and note the trails with the most footfall. The redesigned Exhibition Road in London, England is an attempt to accommodate desire lines rather than forcing pedestrians to cross only at intersections, but I can attest that the reality is frequent near-misses between pedestrians and speeding cars on the wide open, unmarked, arrow-straight roadway: thegridto.com/city/places/steal-this-idea-desire-lines/

Recent Christmas cards

2012-12-28T11:41:00.001-05:00

2012, back in Toronto:

2011, living in England:

2010, about to move to England:

2009, living in Texas:

2008:

What's your favourite?

A quick Toronto font quiz

2012-12-27T16:19:00.000-05:00

Can you name the media outlets by their masthead typefaces?

Video: David gives Alumni Artist talk at OCAD

2012-10-29T15:30:00.000-04:00

I was invited to present my recent work and career highlights as part of the Drawing & Painting thesis Alumni Artists Initiative at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD U) on October 18, 2012:

Photos: More signs from Toronto

2012-10-23T11:01:00.000-04:00

Above a parking space in downtown Toronto:

London may have The Knowledge, but we have...

Imitation and flattery: Sydney copies Legible London

2012-10-15T14:22:00.002-04:00

The City of Sydney unveiled "Legible Sydney", its new pedestrian wayfinding system, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to England's "Legible London". I should note that the same firm didn't design both. Judge for yourself:

Left: Legible London, 2007 Right: Legible Sydney, 2012

Legible London, 2007:

Legible Sydney, 2012:

Just because it works in London doesn't mean 1) that the same environmental, social, and cultural conditions apply halfway around the world, and 2) that you have the right to copy another firm's design work, and 3) you shouldn't make the effort to at least come up with an original name.

Tim Fendley, a principal designer of Legible London, is not amused.

Thanks to Wayne McCutcheon for the tip.

Images from http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/businessandpartners/yellow-book.pdf and

http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/Council/documents/OnExhibition/DraftLegibleWayfindingStrategyReport/Report_StrategicFramework_part_1.pdf

Design fix: A chart-by-committee

2012-10-10T12:28:00.000-04:00

Congratulations! After years of hard work, you're just a few steps away from completing your PhD. Here is a helpful chart to guide you through the final steps:

You can sympathize with my biologist friend who just wrapped up his doctoral work at a major Australian university, no thanks to this terrible chart provided by the school.

What's wrong with it:

Dual personality. The diagram doesn't know it if's a process flowchart ("if yes, go this way, if no, go that way"), or a Gantt chart (with cascading blocks to illustrate the schedule of a complex project).
Confused signals. It's apparent that we're meant to read the chart as a timeline from right to left, but how significant is the positioning of the blocks? Does the protruding left edge of "Final seminar..." compared with "Final work" mean that the seminar is to take place first? Or did the designer just not know how to use the align feature?
Bad legend. The boxes at the very bottom are not part of the diagram, but rather serve as a legend. The unhelpful descriptor "Colours:" and its placement close to the diagram make this important legend more confusing than helpful.
Conflicting line and arrow identities. In certain areas, an arrowed line signifies "follow me". Elsewhere, the same line signifies "this moment in time".
Superfluous information. The white boxes at the top don't add any useful information. In fact, they conflict with the info below them.

The diagram is as much a wayfinding problem as a graphic design problem: how to guide students through the completion process and inform them of their responsibilities at key points. In short: the question this diagram needs to answer is: "what happens next?"

The fix (click the image for a larger view):

Definite start and end points. A consistent graphic system for showing sequence as well as parallel tasks. A clear process with clearly demarcated branch points. Useful but unobtrusive date 'hints'. A prominent, clear legend. A more legible font.

Close-up:

Toronto wayfinding strategy up for Council vote

2012-10-02T16:51:00.002-04:00

Pray that Mayor Ford takes a day off tomorrow. That's when the newest wayfinding initiative comes up for approval at Toronto's city council. Assuming the motions are approved (and barring interference from our notoriously anti-urban mayor), we can look forward to a robust process of consultation before the pilot rollout takes place in the Distillery District and UT Scarborough.

This has the potential to bring about an exciting transformation for the city, and to showcase the value that wayfinding designers can bring to an environment. Imagine tourists arriving at Union Station, no longer needing a map or to ask directions. Imagine knowing which way is which when leaving a subway station.

But before all that: fingers crossed for tomorrow's vote.

Previous post on this topic here.

Photo by Flickr user 24by36. Used under Creative Commons license.

New art: first experiment with casting

2012-09-23T18:12:00.001-04:00

Using mortar mix to create architecture on bricks, concrete shards, and other building debris from the Leslie Street Spit (Tommy Thompson Park). Stay tuned to see where this goes...

Photos: Signs spotted in Toronto

2012-09-19T15:44:00.002-04:00

Two strikes: inaccurate, unnecessary.

In case once wasn't enough.
In case once wasn't enough.
In case once wasn't enough.
In case once wasn't enough.
In case once wasn't enough.
In case once wasn't enough.

MOVE Expo: a review

2012-09-14T14:36:00.001-04:00

Walking is so last year.

That is the message of MOVE Expo, and a strangely appropriate one given the difficulty of accessing the exhibition at Toronto's Brick Works without a car. Showcasing the past, questioning the present, and proposing the future of transportation in the Greater Toronto Area, MOVE Expo is a timely contribution to a conversation that has gained increasing public and media attention in the past two years.

In 2010, Toronto's Board of Trade found that commute times ranked worst out of 19 major North American cities. While other studies have since questioned the findings and bumped Toronto out of the top five, commuters agree that the region faces serious transportation challenges. Endless debates about what to build ("subways!" "streetcars!"), hostility toward accomodating cycling infrastructure, and a de facto moratorium on road building are but a few of the roadblocks to progress that MOVE Expo examines. Down a long corridor mocked up as a subway train interior (complete with banners in Toronto's own 'subway font'; see top photo) we are reminded of the health, social, and environmental benefits of human-powered transit, a message that visitors to the eco-conscious Brick Works have likely already taken to heart.

Rounding the corner, we find no shortage of ideas for solving the citys transport woes. Each proposal promises salvation from gridlock through futuristic dreams of suspended monorails, driverless trackless transit pods, and other high-tech concepts. Sadly, these proposals focus on design solutions while ignoring the underlying questions of politics, planning, and economics which all good transportation projects must address. A lack of money and political will stands in the way of transit progress, not a dearth of design ideas. In fact, the current gridlocked state of affairs is largely the result of the Ontario government's insistence on designing and building their own maglev-style transit in the 1970s to the exclusion of all other, more sensible plans. We are left with white elephant infrastructure such as the Scarborough RT instead of a well-planned, fully-integrated network.

Largely missing from MOVE Expo are grassroots, human-centred proposals: how to increase bicycle use while decreasing collisions and injuries; how the perpetually cash-strapped city government can push ahead with low-cost, high-impact projects; how to reduce commuting times by encouraging workers to live closer to their job given the realities of skyrocketing home prices. Sometimes the best commute is one that never happens.

MOVE Expo would do better to explore these and similar ideas, so that Toronto's residents can lead by example. The monorail may never arrive, but the future might be just a short walk away.

MOVE Expo is on until October 28 at the Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto.

Photos from the MOVE Expo website.

Respect your mental map

2012-09-03T17:30:00.001-04:00

Two recent stories demonstrate the importance of solid wayfinding skills:

The New York Times:
When GPS Confuses, You May Be to Blame

The Atlantic:
Kids Who Get Driven Everywhere Don't Know Where They're Going

Finally, wayfinding for Toronto

2012-08-09T08:35:00.000-04:00

Lost in downtown Toronto? You're not alone. In most other cities, pedestrians can turn to signs and maps installed by the city, in Toronto your best bet is to corner a local, ask for directions, and hope they know what they're talking about.

That's about to change. It has been a long time coming -- too long -- but the city is now taking steps to create its own wayfinding system. Keep an eye out for the pilot programs at University of Toronto (Scarborough) and the area just east of downtown.

Better late than never.

Image from http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/walking/pdf/2012-03-28_panel_10.pdf

Photos: talking back to the signs

2012-08-02T14:19:00.003-04:00

Armed with Sharpies and black humour, commuters in London (top) and Toronto (below) found a way to talk back to the signage:

The Oval Office as self-replicating architecture

2012-07-31T14:23:00.000-04:00

Just days after the 2008 US election, before President Bush could pack his bags for Texas, plans were released for his Presidential Library. It would be built next to Southern Methodist University in Dallas (necessitating the demolition of my closest bank branch) and will include a replica of the Oval Office as it appeared during his tenure in the White House. Most presidential libraries include an Oval Office, each a meticulous reconstruction of the Washington original -- from the drapes to the doilies -- as it appeared during a particular presidency.

Bush Jr. is not the first to build his own, private Oval Office. Replicas have been built at the presidential libraries of Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Ford, Kennedy, Johnson, Truman, and FDR. Not to be outdone, citizen Ron Wade personally built an Oval Office next to his home. In 2008, a fake Oval Office was temporarily constructed in Minneapolis as a photo-op for tourists. As part of a marketing campaign, IKEA slapped up a partial replica in Washington's Union Station, featuring sleek Scandinavian bookcases in the place of antique furniture.

Ignoring for a moment the numerous reconstructions of the famous room for use as movie sets (including the sprawling, semi-accurate set for The West Wing), it's safe to say there are likely more than a dozen Oval Offices in existence. Like a corporation that keeps backups of crucial data at various sites in case of natural disaster, could these shrines to Democracy be part of a harebrained continuity-of-government scheme?

America's fascination with the Oval Office has resulted in a redundancy that seems poignant given the crash of the hijacked, Washington-bound Flight 93 on 9/11. Could these backup Oval Offices serve as blueprints in the event of the original's destruction? Given that many of these replicas are decorated to accurately reflect the office's appearance during the term of a particular president, these imitation Oval Offices are perhaps more 'authentic' than the constantly-evolving version in Washington. With each departing president, the office generates a documentary artefact of its current state in the form of a duplicate. As long as presidents come and go, the Oval Office will continue to be a self-replicating system.

With this in mind, I shouldn't be too upset that the new Bush Library will displace my bank. Like the Oval Office, my bank has branches everywhere.

Photo by flickr user Jinx! Used under Creative Commons license.

Designing a visual resumé

2012-07-30T14:59:00.000-04:00

Work experience listed from newest to oldest, education and skills below: is this the best way for designers and artists to represent their skills? We can do better.

Many job seekers have made the switch to online resumé generators like vizualize.me, where skills and experience are illustrated with charts and timelines.

The result is a prettier resumé, but not one that fully takes advantage of the visual medium. Good graphic design can add value by showing multiple layers of meaning: chronology, hierarchy, relationships, and much more.

What follows are sketches from my own process of designing a visual resumé. They illustrate a variety of possible methods -- each with its own pros and cons -- for organizing and clarifying and curating my experience.

A non-linear diagram showing the relationship between skills and experience can reveal unexpected connections.

Through the size, position, and colour of the circles, Venn diagrams can wordlessly communicate a great deal of information.

More illustrative than diagrammatic, this approach leads viewers through a chronology while denoting relative importance through scale.

Not a chronology, but a process diagram. In this case, symbols (sheet of paper, paper airplane) represent the value an applicant can offer by applying skills and experience.

It's tempting to design an all-visual resumé, but what about the software that recognizes keywords and weeds out unwanted resumés before they're seen by human eyes? No problem: we'll design a computer program that recognizes good design.

Wayfinding, European-style

2012-06-24T18:20:00.002-04:00

A round-up of some of the most interesting (not necessarily the most useful!) signage from a recent trip through Europe:

Hand-painted trail map near Florence; note the distance figures:

Cryptic roadside marker in a Portugese national park:

Wayfinding system in a Geneva apartment complex that's abstracted to the point of being unusable:

Wall marker in Florence showing the second-storey high water mark of the 1966 flood:

A warning sign to be taken seriously, installed by the Canadian government in the French countryside at Vimy:

Braille and texture-augmented map in Gaudi's Casa Battlo in Barcelona:

Swiss simplicity in Geneva:

More from the Swiss: moss is meticulously groomed around this hand-painted trail marker:

Design Research Methods course

2012-06-19T08:38:00.001-04:00

If you can't spare a year for a Masters of Research in England:

Design Research has become a required skill for a working designer however few designers were trained in these skills when they studied design. This course will introduce participants to the emerging field of Design Research and tools that can be used to inform design as well as to ideas about how and when to deploy them effectively so you can be a more successful designer.

Duration: half day.
Location: OCAD University, Toronto

http://drm1t.eventbrite.com/

How colour works

2012-05-25T07:29:00.001-04:00

Remember the old lesson about primary colours? How red + yellow + blue makes all the colours of the rainbow (plus black, for good measure)? I'm not about to say that's wrong. There's just way more to the story.

Enter a darkened theatre. Flip on the red lights, then green, then blue. The stage is now flooded in white light, or something very close to it. What happened? Additive colour. Take a magnifying glass to your smartphone, TV, or almost any other screen, and you'll see that each pixel is actually made up of red, green, and blue sub-pixels: the primary 'additive' colours known as RGB. Start with 'black' (nothing illuminated) and add red, green, and blue light in different proportions to get almost all the colours of the rainbow. Turn them up to full intensity and the result is white.

I said "almost all the colours of the rainbow" because no screen can yet reproduce all the colours that our eyes see; each screen has its own gamut or colour boundaries, outside of which it simply can't reproduce the colour.

Let's return to red, yellow, and blue. Unlike additive colour made with illumination, creating colour with pigment (suspended in ink or paint) works in the opposite way. It's called, unsurprisingly, subtractive colour. Mixing red, green, and blue paint results in muddy brown, not white. Schools teach that the 'scientific' primary colours are red, yellow and blue, and while in theory mixing those colours results in every other colour plus black, the result of our imperfect pigments is brown again; not pure black and not every colour in between.

Press operators have known of this limitation for a long time, so magazines and newspapers (plus the cartridges in your home printer) use cyan, magenta, and yellow in order to create a wider colour gamut. As a cheat, they use black ink too, since cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY) can't quite produce pure black either. The result is the CMYK system. K stands for black so it won't be confused with B for blue -- or so goes one of a few good explanations.

The tricky part for designers comes when printing something in CMYK that's been designed on a computer screen that uses RGB. They don't speak the same colour language, they have very different gamuts, and only with a great deal of finessing can you be sure that a certain colour on-screen will look precisely the same -- or close enough -- when printed.

Print shops have another trick up their sleeve, though: spot colours. These are inks which are premixed to match sample chips, so when a designer tells a printer to use a specific spot colour, whatever it looks like on-screen, the printed result is predictable.

So, where does this leave us? Red + yellow + blue isn't wrong. In a perfect world it would be all we need, and it does help when teaching the principles of colour theory. Like a day of finger-painting, the real world of colour is much more messy, and it takes some practice to end up with something that doesn't look like mud.

Top photo by Flickr user Gwen Vanhee.

Making it too easy: do wayshowers do more harm than good?

2012-05-23T08:15:00.001-04:00

Like a beacon at sea, a street-corner map is a promise of a familiar voice offering reassuring answers: you are here, this way to your destination. Designers refine these answers with one eye on achieving the ultimate promise of wayfinding design: use our maps, follow our signs, and with our help you'll never be lost again.

Consider wayfinding in terms of feedback. 'You are here' dots and the signs that confirm you’re on the right path are examples of positive feedback. Take a wrong turn, and negative feedback tells you something is wrong: nothing is familiar; your destination is no longer listed on the signs.

But do wayfinding designers provide too much feedback, too much help? Are there psychological benefits to getting lost and finding your way again, without the help of a sign?

‘Finding your way’ as an exercise in problem solving has mostly been outsourced to designers who scope the terrain, plan the best routes, and create a system to guide those who come after. When all that is required to find one’s way is to seek out the sign at each decision point and follow the arrow, the challenge of wayfinding and sense of accomplishment in arriving at the destination is diminished.

As Nicholas Carr notes in The Shallows, volunteers for Dutch psychologist Christof van Nimwegen who undertook a logic puzzle using software designed to provide hints actually scored lower than those solving the puzzle unaided. The unaided group was “better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tended to reply on simple trial and error.” (215)

Outsourcing problem solving to a wayfinding designer reduces our ability to generate schemas for use in the future. From van Nimwegen’s experiment, Carr concludes that “the brighter the software, the dimmer the user.” (216). Applying his findings to wayfinding, we could say that better wayshowers make for worse wayfinders.

Could seamless wayshowing be preventing us from practising and honing our innate ability to navigate? Consider the implications when the pampered navigator enters an environment without an existing, effective wayfinding system. I would not suggest that wayfinding aids be stripped from environments such as hospitals and airports where users are already experiencing a high cognitive load; a well-executed wayfinding system can be a godsend.

In other situations, though, perhaps designers need to move beyond ‘usability’ as the overriding concern. Introducing challenges into wayfinding systems – within constraints and always with a fallback system to present unrecoverable mistakes – could be a solution for keeping users’ own wayfinding skills sharp.

Design fix: Wayfinding map in Geneva

2012-04-19T07:36:00.000-04:00

On the road in Europe with an abridged Design Fix look at a poor effort from the Swiss. This map is meant to help lost tourists in Geneva, but:

- Do maps located downtown really need to display the entire city, from suburbs to industrial areas? Even if this means a microscopic font size and barely visible labels?

- What information is most important to downtown pedestrians? The location of the nearest highway, or the nearest transit stop and toilet?

- Where is the "you are here" label?