MTR temporary signage

Keith Tam
(in)visible (de)signs
2 min readMay 27, 2013

At Tai Koo station, exit C is currently closed for escalator maintenance until August. How does the railway company deal with this temporary closure? Apparently they do not have a system for handling temporary messages. Last week, it looked like this:

MTR Tai Koo station temporary signage

Exit C for Aeon (a department store), has been altered to exit B, with a handwritten letter on a piece of cardboard. The directional signs here group exits by direction (left and right). Changing the exit letter for Aeon on the left to B creates confusion: why does exit B appear on both sides?

This morning, it looked like this:

MTR Tai Koo station temporary signage

Now it is typeset, and shows a little arrow that points to the right. Is this the best way? Exit C itself in fact has not been changed or cancelled. It is still exit C, just that it is temporarily closed. Just that passengers who normally use exit C to get to Aeon should now use a different exit. Exit C could simply be crossed out from the list, with a message that says ‘closed until 5 August’. And then besides exit B on the right, add Aeon. A much better solution perhaps? For a large mass transit network that carries out maintenance work on a regular basis, it would be important to have a better strategy to deal with temporary changes in a systematic way.

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Keith Tam
(in)visible (de)signs

Typographer, information designer, academic (Hong Kong Design Institute)