It’s not easy to make your message stick in a viewer’s mind. Especially in an informal learning environment like a zoo or botanical garden. That’s the key concept–visitors have not signed up for a class. They are there primarily to relax and socialize. Yet, visitors are very willing to learn if you can engage them But if they start to think, “This feels like school,” it’s a red flag. They will turn away.

Surveys had shown that visitors exiting major, lavish, expensive exhibitions at large museums, didn’t appear to have learned the main idea behind the exhibit. For example, they still thought a whale was a fish, or in the DBG’s case they still couldn’t tell a cactus from a euphorbia. It became a great mystery in museum studies. Dr. Screven, is a pioneer in studying visitor behavior and psychology in zoos and museums. In addition he created ways to quantify whether the messages were working or not.

The resulting signs were very successful, though the illustrations were humble. The DBG staff knew the signs would be successful because they tested them first using kindergarten-class materials: markers, plasterboard and tape, etc. They watched visitors and interviewed them until they had everything right. It’s the only way to find out. They found that the text was what primarily grabbed people’s interest, not the colors nor the illustrations.

After the signs were produced and in place, they watched and tested them again, using scientific rating methods to score how much a visitor interacted with the sign. After all, that is what counts, not how award-winning the art and designs are.

I had the honor of meeting Dr. Screven and working with the DBG staff in developing the signs for their main trails. It was a challenging project and it changed my way of thinking about how art relates to content, or the message. In a sense, the art and design has to get out of the way. Just like typography, design is the “crystal goblet”, the window into what the sign is saying, the idea or knowledge the viewer walks away with. The design or illustrations, in this context, should not call undo attention to themselves.

Another reason for the simplicity of the art is the medium. The signs were produced using silkscreen. This was in 1996, before Photoshop could manage spot colors. I created all the art as pen or brush and ink on scratchboard. These were scanned and the color was indicated through other software, not very satisfying by today’s standards, using a predetermined color pallate.

You can read more about Dr. Screven’s research and that of others at the Visitors Studies Association web site.

Here are some of the other signs and illustrations I created for this project.