dc.description.abstract | This thesis focuses on various design problems facing graphic designers who design
visual messages for urban transportation environments, specifically bus and subway
systems. The urban transit environment poses a unique challenge for designers
because it is multidimensional, and the audience is in constant motion. As David
Bernstein describes the transit environment: "It's up, down, all around, in the sky,
underground..." (Bernstein, 1997, p. 9).
Added to this unique challenge of capturing the audience's fleeting attention span,
designers also face problems of space limitations, poor lighting, chaotic placement of
posters, and lack of a cohesive visual plan for a transit venue.
Urban transit environments offer myriad kinds of information to its audience of
pedestrians and mass transit riders. These include:
informational (e.g., transit maps),
instructional (e.g., signs telling passengers where and where not to stand),
wayfinding (e.g., directions to the street, trains, taxis),
regulatory (e.g., "no smoking" signs), and
promotional advertising (e.g., commercial posters and billboards).
This study focuses on promotional advertising issues in both indoor and outdoor
transportation venues, the author does so for several reasons: these kinds of
messages dominate the transportation environment, and are of particular interest to
the author as a designer. Advertisements from colorful posters on subway walls
and bus stops, to back-lit commercials, to large billboards and murals covering buses
dominate the urban transit landscape and seem to be placed in no particular order
and have no master plan. However, despite the chaos of promotional advertising, and
possibly due in part to the chaos, it creates a sense of vibrancy and color in the urban
landscape. | en_US |