American EXIT sign Vs the Running Man
This reminds me of cars, Detroit Raw Power VS Japans efficient motors. 2 completely different ways to do the same thing. This one is interesting as I’ve done a lot of European travel and I’m very familiar with the green running man. I’d like to hear our in-house designer’s views on this topic, so I’ll try to get them to comment on this article for everyone to read.
“The classic American emergency exit sign—the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T—seems at first glance 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 color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like). If you’re reading this in a coffee shop, cubicle, or other public place, pause and look around you; it probably won’t take long to find that glowing red beacon.
But people in the rest of the world—at least, the kind of people who spend time considering how to mark a means of emergency egress—think our simple red sign is completely nuts. Many other countries use some version of the ISO standard, a symbol developed the late 1970s by a Japanese designer named 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:”
