The Buenos Aires Visual Plan was the first program to establish an organised system of
traffic sign
Traffic signs or road signs are signs erected at the side of or above roads to give instructions or provide information to road users. The earliest signs were simple wooden or stone milestones. Later, signs with directional arms were introduce ...
s in the city of
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
,Haciendo la ciudad legible by Ronald Shakespear (archived, 18 Jun 2011) developed and implemented between 1971 and 1972. The plan had been thought by the Buenos Aires administration led by then Intendent Saturnino Montero Ruiz and carried out by the design studio managed by architects Guilermo González Ruiz and
Ronald Shakespear has recognised the work of graphic designer and
typographer
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), an ...
Jock Kinneir
Richard "Jock" Kinneir (11 February 1917 – 23 August 1994) was a British typographer and graphic designer who, with his colleague Margaret Calvert, designed many of the road signs used throughout the United Kingdom, Crown Dependencies, and ...
as the main inspiration for the BA Visual Plan. Kinneir, along with his assistant Margaret Calvert, had been designed the road signs in the United KingdomBritish Road Signs on The Design Museum (UK) from 1957 to 1967. Kinneir's sign is considered one of the most ambitious information design projects ever undertaken in the UK, becoming a model for modern road signage in the world. Kinneir and Calvert's system was notable for the use of typography (that included the use of lowercase letters in the signs) and the coordinated use of shapes and chromatic scales to sort the information.
In Shakespear's own words:
The main purpose of the visual plan was to establish an information system which "guided city inhabitants to their destinations without asking anything to anybody".
As part of the visual plan development, all the road and street name signs were redesigned. Before the plan, street name signs were fitted to walls, and then featured different typographies. The González Ruiz/Shakespear studio replaced them with signs located on street corners. Those signs consisted of posts with two plaques attached, each one indicating the street name and way. on Pagina/12, 3 Aug 2002 Those signs also introduced the use of the helvetica font in the urban signal system of Buenos Aires. The ''Helvetica'' would be also adopted as the corporate font by the Municipality of Buenos Aires. In more recent years, later revisions of the original signs included advertisement banners on the top of them, something that Shakespear himself complained about.
Although the visual plan is mostly known for its road and information signs, it was indeed a complete visual identity project for the city of Buenos Aires that include elements of corporate identity such as logo, colors, employees uniforms, among other elements.
Other informative elements that were part of the system were the
bus stop
A bus stop is a place where buses stop for passengers to get on and off the bus. The construction of bus stops tends to reflect the level of usage, where stops at busy locations may have shelters, seating, and possibly electronic passenger ...
taxi
A taxi, also known as a taxicab or simply a cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice ...
stops, signs for parks and a simplified version of the
coat of arms of Buenos Aires
The coat of arms of Buenos Aires is the official shield used by the different areas and dependencies of the Government of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The current coat of arms was adopted by law number 4408, sanctioned by the Buenos Air ...
. The taxi stop signal was depicted as a hand (symbolising the way of "hail" a taxi), using the typical yellow and black colors of that vehicles. That signal was also replicated in other cities, nevertheless it was replaced by a simpler version in 2012, during the Mauricio Macri administration.La célebre manito abandona la ciudad on Tiempo Argentino, 8 May 2012 (archived, 24 Dec 2013)
See also
*
Ronald Shakespear
Ronald Shakespear (born 1941 in Rosario, Santa Fe) is an Argentine graphic designer, mostly known for the Buenos Aires Visual Plan, designed along Guillermo González Ruiz in 1971–72.Road signs in Argentina
Further reading
* ''Señal de Diseño. Memoria de la práctica'' by Ronald Shakespear – Ed. Infinito, Buenos Aires (2003) –