ICM - Leeds Design Agency

The Exit sign is a piece of signage you see in every building. A running man on a green background. It’s a pictogram, and it’s green. The sign’s wordlessness means it can be understood even by people who don’t speak the local language. And the green color, just makes sense. Green is the color of safety, a color that means go the world over. Designed by Yukio Ota and adopted for international use in 1985. This take on the exit sign goes by the informal name “the running man,” and looks like this.

Below is a variation

So why in America is their sign different? At first glance it looks like an unimpeachable bit of sign design. The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the colour is the same as most fire-safety devices. But why confuse panicked evacuees with a sign that means right this way in a color that means stop? and in language that not everybody understands.

This battle over the exit sign has been brewing for 25 years now, and the green guy is slowly making inroads in America. But to understand whether he should triumph, we must understand America’s skepticism toward pictograms and symbols, which have long been more popular in the rest of the world than they are there.

American signs tend to be wordy because in most America cities it’s safe to assume people speak English. As a result, the sign systems have typically communicated in text. Europe, by contrast, developed symbolic road signs as early as 1968. On a continent where you can’t drive for more than a few hours before encountering a new language, the pictorial approach made sense.

Over the next few decades, however, designers around the world began to use graphical symbols with increasing frequency, especially in busy pedestrian environments where speakers of multiple languages were likely to congregate: airports, train stations, and—funnily enough—the Olympics. For the Mexico City Games in 1968, the American designer Lance Wyman introduced a system of pictograms so comprehensive the tickets were nearly textless. In the late ’60s, British airports introduced a set of pictograms, some of which are still in use.

When pictograms have proved so successful at airports etc it’s hard to belive that anyone would want any confusion on something as important as a safety sign. In recent years, more green “EXIT” signs have gone up around America, although red ones still predominate. In 2006, New York City changed its fire code to mandate that high-rises include the pictogram on fire doors on each floor. So sure enough, the running man can make his green escape.