If you live in a city with crosswalks, you’ve probably seen something like this.

And if you’ve seen this button, you’ve probably wondered whether it actually does anything. The signage suggests that if a pedestrian presses the button, the walk sign will appear and traffic will stop. Of course, traffic doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) revolve solely around the pedestrian, so the traffic cycle will play out before changing to walk. Often, even if the button is never pressed, the cycle will rotate through walk and don’t-walk signs with no human input. In most of these cases, it’s really difficult to know whether pushing the button has any effect on shortening the cycle. As a result, if you wait on the corner and watch people interact with this button, they will often either not push it at all despite needing to walk, or they’ll repeatedly push it, getting more and more annoyed that nothing is happening.

It’s possible that some of these systems are just placebos that make people feel in-control of the traffic cycle. It’s more likely that the system actually does work in some capacity, but doesn’t communicate what is happening in a satisfying manner. In it’s current state, this feels like a failed interaction, even if the system works as intended.

What could be improved? I’ll offer one suggestion for now. Let’s start by thinking about the different parts of this system:

1) Assume this is a simple intersection with 2 directions of car traffic, left turn lane protections for cars, and 2 directions of pedestrian traffic. There will be walk signs in both directions of traffic, along with stoplights for cars.

2) There is some traffic cadence e.g. 45 seconds for one direction of traffic, then 45 seconds for the other, with a 5 second pause in between.

3) This could be broken into two ranges: the minimum amount of time for traffic to flow before changing could be 30 seconds, and the maximum could be 1 minute.

In this setup, the default could be set to the maximum cadence time— traffic flows for a minute before switching directions. Pushing the button could set the cadence to its minimum of 30 seconds.

Right now, the frustration is generally due to the lack of feedback to the button-pusher. What if there was a simple countdown clock under the button that turns on after the button is pushed? Once the button is pushed, however much time is left on the traffic cadence cycle would be displayed on the countdown clock.

Perhaps this exists already— I have hazy memories of seeing better versions of these walk buttons outside of the US— but if not, I hope to see something like this soon! Even as cities switch to using motion detection for stoplights— having some simple feedback for pedestrians (and perhaps drivers) to understand what is happening under the hood generally will make for a more empathetic, less-frustrating experience.

Background

The National Parks speak for themselves, so long as you get a chance to visit. For the National Parks Service, then, the task of getting Americans and people from around the world to go to our 60+ national parks are one of their most important tasks. Today, the National Parks have a unified design system, the much heralded Unigrid System, that affords all of their materials a consistent style. But before the introduction of this design system in the 1970s, the NPS still produced beautiful work.

I chose to analyze a Yellowstone National Parks silkscreen print poster from the 1930s. A little background: coming out of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a number of large public works projects across the US to both provide jobs (and paychecks, thus stimulus) to the large numbers of unemployed people, and to focus them on issues of national importance. One of those public works projects was the Federal Art Project, that stepped in to “spread the word” about the US National Parks after another public works project, the Civilian Conservation Corps completed preservation projects at the parks (read here for more background). I visited Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons this summer and came back with a renewed sense of appreciation for the parks and the NPS who maintains that great treasure of ours.

Grid System and Heirarchy

Even before the unigrid system formalized a design system across the NPS, this public works artist — who is still anonymous — adhered to a grid as well. As is apparent in the illustration below, all text occupies the top and bottom 20% of the poster, leaving the rest of the poster available for illustration. Old Faithful Geyser occupies the left half of the page, while the set of services provided by the park rangers lives in the right half of the page, forming a jigsaw-like contrast. The Parks logo is dead center, as is the center line of the “W” in Yellowstone. Even though this is a hand-drawn illustration, there is a very clean, organized aesthetic that accompanies the soft, organic feel of the rest of the poster due to the artist’s use of a grid system.

The grid serves to aid the composition and visual hierarchy of the poster. The big, blue skies of Yellowstone sweep across the page, while Old Faithful, the most popular attraction at the park, plays the starring role with its signature massive eruption. The dark contrast at the bottom of the page further reinforces the prominence of Old Faithful and allows the text to catch the eye second.

Remember, the poster is a part of a marketing campaign to help the American people both discover the National Parks and boost morale during a tough time. The poster very effectively captures the grandeur and simplicity of Yellowstone at once while passing along important information about the services offered by the US Federal Government - an important political objective for FDR.

Color

Part of the effectiveness of the poster is its color scheme. The colors gradually flow across a gradient from a dark stone blue at the base of Old Faithful to off-white steam spouting into the sky. The sky blue and text work well together— the text feels like it is cut out from the sky, just a transparency of the deeper blue. Text, lighter sky shading and shadowing for Old Faitfhul’s spout are all the same shade of blue, which lends a consistency and peacefulness to the illustration.

Typography

There is only one font used in the poster— Natura, which you can see below. The letter “A” is among the most distinctive letters in this generally stylized text, and focusing on the A shows how handmade this poster really is. Although the text is all the same font, it varies in size among the various headers and footers. However, as you can see in annotations 1, 2, and 3 as well as 4, 5, and 6, even when the letters are meant to be exactly the same, they vary a bit in width. In the age of digital printmaking, this sort of “error” would need to be intentional, otherwise it would likely not occur. In the 1930s era of analog (but still mass-produced) printmaking, this was unlikely to be intentional, but is nevertheless charming.