Hold The Handrail – TfL's horribly confusing safety posters

I can't be the only one who finds Transport for London's safety posters rather ill-conceived. TfL's graphics do not enhance their messages – their posters are confusing.

The design team seems to have overlooked that many people who use the network are visitors and tourists from other countries for whom english is not their fist language, and it's no good mentioning a handrail in big bold capital letters if the handrail mentioned is not clearly indicated in the image, whether you understand the language or not. 

A depiction of a hand actually holding the handrail might have been a nice idea, with the words placed in such a way they they highlight/enhance the handrail in the graphic. I'm also surprised that none of the posters include a pleasantry or an explanation, such as 'For your safety, please hold the handrail'. 

Let's start with the buses – signs like these can be found at the top of the stairs on many routes:

At first glance, it appears to say, HOLD HANDRAIL. Ah, but no, there's a tiny little THE at the end of the stairs, looking like an afterthought. The message might make better sense if the 'designers' had aligned the words with the handrail(s) and, for clarity, added a hand holding the handrail at bottom left. Note the handrail is here depicted in yellow, but on this bus the rails are orange. 

A similar version of this can be found on the underground where the handrail is coloured black as per the moving handrails on escalators yet, but they've painted the side walls blue when, in reality, they are are actually silver colour. 

The handrails in the graphic are barely noticeable at all. The poster seems to be luring us into a golden sunset where a little white 'the' is waiting to take us down a fiery tunnel (to hell?). 

Travelling down the long Elizabeth Line escalators at Farringdon, I spotted this animated version which starts with the world HOLD in roman, then it becomes italicised as HANDRAIL appears across it in white. It wasn't until I looked at these pics that I noticed the word 'the' again hiding in there. 

These signs are bonkers. Someone took the time to design this. And someone else approved it. It beggars belief. 

I think at some point they realised that these posters make scant sense, so someone had the bright idea to link the word HOLD with the visual depiction of the handrail, thus we see a series of posters where the O appears like a ring on a curtain rail that, being fully circular, only slides up and down or laterally but can't let go of the rail, as shown below within the carriages:

Call me pedantic(!) but I am not sure many of us refer to a vertical pole as a handrail.

Moving on, they also created a series of alternative poster designs on this theme, as shown here below at Holborn station. These dispense with the chunky drop shadow letters, as shown above, instead using TfL's Johnston typeface:

These posters depict a mysterious androgynous figure, almost silhouetted at top right, who has speared a big Polo mint and is about to spin it around. Holborn station is slathered in signs of this design – on the platforms, in the tunnels that connect the Central and Piccadilly lines, before the escalators and pasted into the gaps between the escalators, as shown here, viewed from the bottom, the top and mid-journey (ascending):

Heading up towards street level, I struggled to snap the second two pics above. It's almost impossible to read these things as you glide past – you'd need to be at least 8ft tall to be able focus on them, let alone be able to read the content. The message is therefore lost in transit. 

At street-level, on the concourse, three of them are pasted on the wall:

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall during the creative brief for this. I think the design department was first tasked to create the blue poster and, when someone slipped over on a wet floor, they adapted it for the green version and then realised that people with bags are an issue and so the purple poster was made. Somewhere in the middle of all this, the orange Don't Rush version was created.

If you read the smaller text here, you'll see that some of these posters advise us to use the lift which, here at Holborn, is misleading in two respects; 1) you might already be half way up an escalator at this point, and 2) there are no lifts at this station. Or stairs for that matter. 

The purple poster irks me the most and I wonder what message do they think they have conveyed here?  Considering how foreboding this is, what with the colour scheme of black and purple and that shady figure, it looks more like they are telling us to watch out for luggage thieves who might steal our suitcases. Or, perhaps that dark figure is supposed to be you/me, suggesting that we should hold the handrail whilst we slide our luggage ahead of us down the pole?!  Hmm, letting go of the bag is not a good idea and this is why I think another poster was created on this subject (see further down).

Got Luggage? Eurgh!  This kind of short question-heading is everywhere these days and I really don't like it. It requires us to do an upward inflection at the end when we notice the question mark! Add to that, the use of 'got/get' which is lazy and can always be replaced with something better.

On the subject of luggage, this next one is sublime, for all the wrong reasons...

The design style here is quite similar to the one on the buses. However, here, the two words that have been given the most visual emphasis are 'the' and 'too' – leaving the instruction to 'hold the handrail' lost within a red wheelie bag that seems to tell us that we should place our luggage sideways across the footplate, thus blocking up the space for anyone who wants to walk past. It certainly doesn't show us to hold the bag and the handrail which is what they are trying to say here. 

Ah, but, hold on, (see what I did there?!) this wheelie bag seems have made the journey up the escalator all by itself. Note that the handle is depicted as being away from us, suggesting that this is not our bag but the property of some poor soul who has let go of their luggage but is now out of view somewhere on the concourse at the bottom!

As regards the typography on this one, the message to 'hold the handrail' is completely muddled. It's as if someone recalled Katherine Hamnett's T-shirts back in the 1980s but didn't grasp that they work because the largest words in those statements were the ones that were the most important. Instead, here we see HOLD, the most important word, in italics on across the top of the bag, black on red (and vice-versa) being the worst pairing of colours for legibility. Instead, 'the handrail too' in white letters stands out as some kind of cryptic puzzle.

I was going to continue here and address some of TfL's other posters of this type but I think I will save them for another day.

In the meantime, please hold onto your hats and bags and handrails, in anticipation.

……

Update: w/c11Nov: I found another one – this is within the below ground tunnels at Waterloo:

This poster depicts a spiral staircase, yet is placed at the top of a straight flight of stairs. Note the depiction of teeny tiny treads on the stairs and I'm also querying the rotation of the spiral being as the one at my local station at Holloway Road curves round and down to the left, making it a clockwise descent. Do they vary station to station?

London Tramways – posters and artworks at the London Metropolitan Archives

Another day, another archive, another subject.
And equally as marvellous, but for different reasons.
The London Metropolitan Archives recently held an open day event where posters and artworks from the tram age were be on display.
How could I resist?
I was there the minute the place opened. On a table in the middle there were piles of lovely printed posters from the 1920s and the 1930s. But better still were the actual artworks or designs for those posters on the side tables and these showed a bygone world of hand-lettering, retouching, cut and paste, and pencilled annotations – all devices we no longer, or very rarely, implement these days now that most things are computer generated.

The poster on the left is hand panted in thick block colours – see how some of the place names have been cut out and stuck on top to indicate where they should be placed in the final version. The second poster, which is also artfully hand painted, has a wealth of information and amendments written down the right-hand edge including about deletions and additions. The third poster here shows places linked to Dickens' London. The placenames were, for some reason masked out, but by holding it up to the  light I could see them, The last poster shows a glimpse of a fabulously colourful image for Hampstead Ponds and some beautifully rendered hand lettering  – note how accurately the gold outline has been applied – this is all done with a brush!!

All of this reminded me of when I first started working in the advertising world back in 1980. A designer would produce a colourful, hand-rendered design for the client, using Magic Markers, Pentel Pens and gouache with perhaps, a few images glued onto that. And he'd point to the client's supplied image, probably in slide format, and say "this part of this image will be here".  Clients seemed to have more imagination back then and they trusted the design agencies to produce what they required.
Once the design was approved it was then passed on to the artworker (that was me) and/or the typographer (also me) to pull together an accurate 'artwork for print'. This was a black and white rendition of the design made with the help of Rotring pens, a PMT machine, Cow Gum and Rubylith which was then sent to the reprographic department to be made ready for the printer. It was a marvellous creative process.
Today we have AppleMacs and digital cameras and various photo editing programs and everyone thinks they are an armchair designer. Apparently, we just wave a magic wand at the computer and it does all the work. I think clients think it's some kind of mind-melding process. A download of sorts. The daft thing is that it takes longer to produce something from concept to printed product than it did 50 years ago because today people are amending almost hourly. Yawn.
Anyway enough reminiscing... back to the tram posters...

A poster for London Zoo had a contemporary sketch (known as a 'scamp') beside showing another layout. The second poster shows amendments made by masking out with paper and with white paint. The third pic shows two posters – the one on the left has been part filled in with colour. Note the panel at the bottom of that poster which looks to have been originally painted as white lettering on a black panel but a section of it is rendered in yellow on green. It was the latter option that was chosen for the printed poster as can be just seen in the pic at the very top of this post.  The other poster in that image has very vibrant colours of bright blues, yellow and orange with handwritten annotation in lovely red inked script. The final pic shows a beautiful painting of a tram with almost type-quality hand-lettering applied in white brush strokes underneath.

More adeptly applied paint in the first pic of this section – note the quality of the lettering here, especially the squiggly inline on the black letters.
The last three pics are of printed examples. The Pullman Tramcar poster just amused me because it seemed a bit odd to show a pic of a sedan chair – what are they saying; that the trains are as slow as two men carrying a heavy weight?!
I was intrigued by the designs and the illustrators/artists whose signatures appeared on most of the finished posters. I made a note of most of them and it seems that rarely did a artist get employed twice. As for the printers who were employed by London County Council Tramways to produce these colourful posters, it appears the main two were Waterlow & Sons, Dunstable, and Vincent Brooks Day & Son, WC2. I also spotted two posters showing a printer from just around the corner from my home; Hill, Siffken & Co, Grafton works, N7. Sadly, I can't find anything find anything about the company except in reference to the things they printed. Any info welcome. 

I was like a pig in a colourful pit of loveliness, cooing and oohing about the artistic details of this and that and asking Simon the curator the occasional question.
It was amusing (to me), that apart from a brief visit by one other woman, the room mostly contained older men, many of whom were, I think, a little bit disappointed that there wasn't more about the actual trams and the tramlines. A lot of them looked through the posters disdainfully as if they had to do that and occasionally one would say something like, "that's the ABC1237 that used to run via Elephant and Castle but they changed the route to go past London Bridge and renumbered it in September 1931; ".
Well, I enjoyed myself and I am really glad I went there!
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitan-archives/Pages/default.aspx is a major resource for historical information for anyone doing any research be it family history, old maps and photos etc. They also have an online search facility and a marvellous photo library.
It looks like I will need to use the archive to find out more about Siffken & Co.

Tram access covers feature in one of my posts from last year.