Definition B: A posted command, warning or direction.

We owe much of the signage systems that are still in use today, such as milestones, to the ancient Romans. After the Romans built their roads, they created series of road signs showing you the distance and direction to Rome. As technology has evolved, so to have the devices and materials used for road signs. With the introduction of speedier travel in the form of trains, automobiles and aircrafts new signage has been created to suit each form of transport. Major improvements took place in the early to mid 20th Century to form a universal signage system for road users. In the early 1920’s Otto Neurath began work on a pictorial system that could be used to communicate in a way that was both “visually appealing and accessible.” Neurath decided that for his system to work, it would need to comply with a number of principles. The most relevant to this essay are: “The basic images should speak for themselves and be used repeatedly, so they would become familiar; in order to achieve an undisturbed composition, the basic images should be in black and white whenever possible; other images should use a limited spectrum of colours; the compositions should be laid out without perspective, which would distort the basic images and diminish their legibility.” It is thanks to Neurath’s ingenius vision shown in his Isotypes that we have the universal pictorial system on signs today. In 1949 Geneva held a UN conference on road and motor transport, creating a protocol. “In the protocol there are three basic kinds of traffic signs; signs to warn, signs to prohibit and signs to instruct.” Several countries, including the United States, Germany and Ireland have chosen not to fully comply with the protocol, resulting in interesting variations of signage, as seen in B1.

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