Downtown News Echos Wayfinding Sentiments

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — The new issue of the Downtown News runs an editorial saying basically the same thing I have about the Downtown wayfinding signage: good job, but now fix the dumb mistakes.

Though it is likely too late to add a "Downtown" identifier to the signs directed at drivers, there is still an opportunity to improve the most perplexing examples. Those signs should be temporarily taken down and changed using funds from the program's maintenance budget (there is a maintenance budget, right?). In almost all cases, simple and quick solutions are available, such as altering "Broadway Th District" to "Broadway Theaters." "Spring St Hist/Fin" could certainly be replaced with "Spring Street" and a direction arrow. Embrace brevity. That simple sentence is worth saying twice: Embrace brevity.

I was in the paper's office today to drop something off and Jon Regardie showed me the story they had run about the signage back in the spring. These same incomprehensible abbreviations were in the mockup signage that ran on their front page. If only we had caught it then...