Environmental Graphic Design Class #4

Friday 30 September 2022, our fourth class this semester, and another site visit to a public place near the Tangerang area. We went to a Mall called Tangerang City Mall, I’ve visited it once because that’s the nearest mall near one of the events I attended a few years ago. If I can describe the place it’s wholly crowded and it’s a bit confusing for their store placements. We were told to meet on the Second Floor at the Food Court near the arcade and XXI cinema.

We arrive on time, we met our lecturer and went straight to assist our assignment for the exam project. From our assistance, we got a lot of comments and suggestions for our project. We used Supermall Karawaci for our object of analyzing and developing using signage design, the comments and suggestions for our lecturers were:

• Do symbols need texts to explain? or not?
• Technical issues: Sizing of the symbols, Thickness of the signage, Lighting for the signage, Color code, shapes of the signs, etc
• Update the sign information based on the area we needed to put the signage
• etc.

After we finished our assistance, we went straight to do the other assignment and took a tour around the mall to search for pictograms that are used by the mall. We went from the same floor that is used for our meeting point and then went down one by one. We noticed that there is so much inconsistency in the usage of the pictogram design. For instance, there are a lot of similar designs that are used for the toilets, but when we went to the emergency door, escalators, lifts, or maybe outside the mall the designs are all different in their proportions, design, and colors that they used for the design.

It’s funny to finally realized that there are a lot of places that do not care about designs at all for public places like malls. And as a design student, it’s a bit irritating to see that because we spent years creating and building ideas so they can be used effectively and aesthetically pleasing. But when we see the usage in this kind of place, it made us annoyed and confused at the same time. Well, there are a lot of reasons that we can see in this mall, where they prefer the importance of giving people information over the design. Also because of the pandemic, the importance of signage to give regulation to people is important, so the management only put the signage without thinking about the difference between the design of the late signage with the new design.

These visits really gave us a view of good and bad design when it is used in public places. The difference between the last site visit felt so far from one another and it is actually fascinating to see in real life. I learned that using a pictogram is not as easy as searching it on the internet, saving it, and just copying it to your work. But it includes technical things such as the usage of grids, the usage of proportions, and visual characters in a design.

I’ll hope our next visit will be as interesting as this week, So that’s it for this week’s weekly blog! Hope you enjoy it! Thanks for reading!