The Spanish eat so late!
They speak so loud!
Everyone is so direct!
Before moving to Spain, I’d heard the rumours, and just a few days into my living here, I could confirm that at least these three were true. But it’s been a while now, and I think I’ve just about gotten used to all that. Me he españolizado. But there’s still one thing that has me at a loss, both figuratively and literally: the lack of decent signage.
Whether it’s a hospital or a department store, my local supermarket or a train station, there’s always a noticeable lack of decent wayfinding here. We Madrilians might complain about the terrible signage on the city’s ring road, but the problem is much more widespread than just some dodgy signs on slip roads. No matter your location, it’s an odyssey to figure out how to get to where you want to go or, even worse, where you already are.
I’m not exaggerating. Take any complex building or structure, and you’ll be faced with one of two scenarios. There might be a complete lack of signs, in which case you can either ask for directions or simply head off on an adventure to try and find what you’re looking for. Alternatively, you’ll find a disjointed system of haphazard and often homemade signs, often improvised by exasperated employees who are fed up of attending to people who are unable to orient themselves. This visual cacophony is often more confusing than having no signs at all.
This flies in the face of a basic design principle. When we encounter a wall which has been plastered with a thousand signs, we will simply not read a single one — even though one of them is probably pointing us in the right direction. It’s a scenario that reminds me of a talk by the late Ken Garland in Leeds over a decade ago, in which he praised the lack of signs in the auditorium in which we all sat. It was the first time that anyone had plainly laid out to me one of the most seemingly obvious laws of visual design: the more content you include, the less people will read.
But these design laws aren’t respected here. Despite this country’s many admirable qualities, I keep coming back to this one failing: the signage is terrible and I keep getting bloody lost.
This usually results in one thing: I have to open my mouth and ask someone. I don’t care if they’re an employee, a random bystander, or someone who looks equally as lost as me, I’ll approach them and ask for directions. This is partly out of sheer necessity, but it’s also a habit learned through observation. Faced with awful wayfinding, people here just speak up and ask.
And that right there is the crux of this conundrum. Perhaps Spanish people don’t worry about signage because they don’t rely on it. They don’t care if there’s no way of figuring out where the gastroenterology department is, because they’ll just wander up to the first person they see and ask. If that person doesn’t know, on to the next.
I have to admit that I took this theory from a colleague after a conversation about it last week, which undoubtedly arose after I began complaining about Spanish signage. Hers it may be, but I feel that, as an outsider, I can testify to its veracity. I come from a culture which tends to avoid interaction more than promote it, and this conclusion seems to make perfect sense.
So never mind late meals, shouting, or directness, what might set Spain apart from my native England more than anything is the value placed on community over the individual. I think it’s this fundamental cultural difference that encourages these little social interactions, from the idle chit-chat in waiting rooms to the collective strife to try and find the bloody pillow cases in El Corte Inglés. The signage is lacklustre because nobody really cares to read it anyway. It’s secondary, a fallback.
Being a designer and an introvert, I’ve to admit that I prefer the English system. There’s nothing more pleasing to a typography nerd than a well composed wayfinding system, and there’s nothing greater for a weak social battery than being able to navigate a space without having to look a single person in the eye. But, deep down, I know that the Spanish system is probably better.
As much as I may love the signs in John Lewis, I think that a society which speaks to each other is a society a little less doomed to loneliness and unhappiness. For the greater good, I’ll have to put up with shitty bits of paper sellotaped to a wall at my doctors.
This whole theory is just that, so I could be way off. The link between societal priorities and the quality of wayfinding signage must just be one huge coincidence. Just like me being on the right floor at the hospital.
