#214: The Wedding Signs
An object you cannot misinterpret

Last weekend two of my closest friends got married (you may know one of them…), and I was in charge of the signage.
I would like to estimate how many signs I made for this wedding, but honestly it was so much of a blur that I don’t remember. There were signs to get you to the reception venue, signs for the parking and the toilets, signs to tell you how to fill in the guestbook and to use the jars to drink from.
Like primary school craft time, another of Katie’s bridesmaids and I were given a lot of art materials and left to entertain ourselves. The result was a huge pile of signs.
A sign is an object with a clear purpose: to provide information. This information is usually short, sharp and pertinent to the specific location of the sign. Sometimes we find intangible signs in other objects or experiences, seeing a pink sky in the morning as a weather warning or a found penny as a lucky token. Actual physical signs, however, are objects that require little mystery or decoding to guide people.

A sign is not a very good sign if it is not clear, hence the large black permanent marker I used to draw a lot of these card instructions. Whether they were directing people to the barn, or letting them know to fill in the guestbook, the signs could contain no element that could be misinterpreted.
This makes a sign an object unlike many Katie and I choose to write about. The intangible associations of a sign are very purposeful: what you see is what you get. A sign could mean ‘Go this way’ or ‘Do this thing’, and hopefully everybody seeing that object would interpret it the same.
Signs are thus universal, and I like to think those we made helped every guest at that reception, one way or another. And yet I also like to think our signs had a purpose beyond simple instructions. These wedding signs gave the reception a voice, a voice that was warm and caring, and wanted its guests to have a great time.
Because as I wrote those signs, whether I was telling people to be sure to shut the gate to stop the pigs escaping, or to come and grab me if they had a problem with the Polaroid camera, what I was really trying to say, to sign to these people, was simply: ‘I hope you have a good time’.

