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Useful copy in the real world

by Christine Benson on May 5th, 2009

I saw this sign during a recent trip to Midtown Global Market.

 

notice

I liked it for the following reasons:

  • It clearly communicated that there was still a play area but it had been moved.
  • It helped me understand where I was in the market (northeast)  and where I would need to go (southwest).
  • The graphic gave me additional information (rather than acting as unnecessary decoration) and reinforced which direction I should go to find the play area.
  • The design isn’t any fancier than it needs to be. It’s clear, simple, and readable from a distance. 

There are only two improvements I could offer:

  • Use sentence case to improve the readability.
  • Change relocated to moved. Same message, only simpler.

Nice job, Midtown.

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Editorial Strategy, User Experience, Web Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Chris L
    Wouldn't it be even simpler to just say it is in the southwest corner. I don't think it matters that it was somewhere else...its there now.
  • carrie
    I saw that sign and, yeah, it's super clear. I found where I needed to go right away, although I'm perpetually disoriented inside the MGM.
    "Currently" is a pet peeve of mine, though. I'd have to nix it.
  • Brian E Kirby
    Don't know if this is strictly an NYC thing or not, but I recently noticed that the signs near the Jersey-bound Holland Tunnel have been changed from "Alternate Merge" to "Take Turns Merging."
    Guess someone at the DOT finally realized that "alternate" has two different (or, you might say, alternate) meanings and that the word choice wasn't optimal.
  • I think combining the written directions with the attempt at mapping (the arrow) was a bit much. It's hard to know how helpful (or not) the arrow really is without knowing the space - i.e. how hard is it for me to see or get to the SW corner.
    As an aside, have you ever noticed that residents of different states / cities seem to have different relationships with compass directions? Here in NYC we never use N/S/E/W - but in LA, for example, it's very common.
  • And they didn't use Comic Sans!
    A small, but important, victory.
  • South west should be southwest, I believe, and lower case on the Northeast.
  • I like it, too, but I'd make one additional change for the geographically-challenged: snake an arrow from "You are currently in the northeast corner" up to the upper right (northeast) corner of the page. Or, better yet, put a "You are here" with an "X" up there.
    That simple change would really lock in visually where you are vs. where you should be.
  • Mark Jackson
    In my opinion, the improvements for clarity could go a few steps further:
    1) "Notice" doesn't need to be all caps, underlined and in red. Perhaps just all caps and red would suffice.
    2) The colon after notice could go.
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