Wayfinding

A signage poster tells you the event is organised. It reads as a plan rather than an advert, which is a genuine relief on an event with many things happening at once.

It also solves a real problem. Six attractions in six icons on a route line is faster to read than six bullet points, and it survives being seen from four metres away.

Draw the event as a diagram. A route line with dots, or a simple plan with zones, and each attraction as a labelled stop.

Build one pictogram set: same stroke weight, same corner radius, same circle around each. Consistency is the entire effect.

Palette is institutional and flat: a signal colour, a navy, white, light grey. Type is a humanist sans, two weights only, and every label aligns to the same baseline grid.

Use it for a festival with a site map, a multi-venue day, an open day, a trail, a sports event, anything with places and times.

Leave it alone for a single simple event. A route diagram with one stop on it looks silly.

Swiss Style is the parent and stays abstract. Wayfinding adds the icons and arrows that a physical place needs.

A modern icon system uses the same pictograms but arranges them as a grid rather than as a route, and usually belongs to an app rather than a station.

Harry Beck's 1933 London Underground diagram is the founding document, Otl Aicher's pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympics made the icon set a design object in its own right, and Massimo Vignelli's 1972 New York subway map argued the same case in America.

The model returns illustrated icons with varying line weights. Say one consistent stroke weight for every pictogram, each inside a circle of the same size.

The second failure is decorative type. Ask for a humanist sans in two weights and nothing else, aligned to a baseline grid.