May I Use the Restroom

It happened in a park in Portland. Some woman follows an "outdoor bathroom" sign into the woods and instead of relieving herself, is surprised to find a creepster waiting for her. Nothing dangerous happens, the guy just stands there staring at her, and she goes back out into civilization to find an indoor bathroom, or a "bathroom" as we call it.

The first thing that comes to mind is - Do we really need a sign indicating an "outdoor bathroom?" Isn't the whole outdoors a big bathroom? Do you need a sign for that?

Next, it's not that hard to make a fake bathroom sign. In fact, I think it's harder to find someone who would read this sign and follow it than it is to make the sign.

That's not to take anything away from our national treasure, the bathroom sign. You think I'm being hyperbolic. A tiny fact that goes mostly unknown - the bathroom sign as we know it was created in the 1970's in Bloomfield NJ by a graphic designer named Roger Cook, of Cook and Shanosky, as part of a competition put forth by the Federal Transportation Administration in response to the rise in global air travel. (See the collection of symbols here at the Cooper Hewitt website.)

The FTA wanted people who don't speak English to be able to navigate the US once they arrived, so they started this competition via the American Institute of Graphic Arts to get a set of navigational signs that would make sense to everyone, sans language.

Cook won the competition and the rest was history. Also part of this was the No Smoking sign. Not sure which one is more popular. Yes, it came from somewhere, and this is where. This is good one the next time you're trying to out-obscure your social media followers.

I bring all this up to point out that there is such thing as a "real" bathroom sign and a fake one. Cook didn't win this competition for the idea of the images alone, although that was important too. There are lots of other things to consider in the value of a a graphic design, such as line thickness, spacing between lines, positive space, negative space, line style, whether they are solid or dashed or fuzzy or clean or edged with right angles or curves, and the list goes on.

We, the general public, don't notice these things. We only notice that something looks good or doesn't, but we can't tell why. Cook knew why, and how, and so his version of the restroom sign is the real version, and all others are fakes. There are no rules about copying this, however, because it was never owned by Cook; he made it for this competition, and when he won, he gave it over to the Feds, so we all own it, and can butcher it and hold no accountability.

Woman lured by 'creepy' fake bathroom signs in public park
Apr 2018, KMOV