From the first day that I started working on Signs.com, I began to notice a strange change within me. One day I went to lunch at Subway. I opened the front door and immediately noticed their window decals, not as a simple advertisement to me and every other $5 footlong connoisseur, but as a product. I wondered if it was static cling or adhesive, if it was printed by a solvent printer or UV. I examined the DPI and the hand of the material. Then I would look up and notice everyone looking at me like I had serious psychological problems (which I probably do, but that’s beside the point).
Everywhere I went, I started to see signage as a product. Perhaps the most surprising thing was the mere quantity of signage that we are all exposed to on a daily basis. Take 30 seconds of your drive into work one day and look at all the signage you are exposed to. If you’re cognizant of it, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s almost ridiculous how much signage we are exposed to every minute of our lives.
I wanted to see if I could capture the essence of this to somehow to prove my point. The video below gives you just a glimpse into the sign saturation I’m talking about. Keep in mind while you watch it that the video camera has a much narrower field of view than the naked eye so your actual exposure is probably twice what you see here. Also, I recorded my entire drive on the I-15 corridor of Salt Lake City, Utah, but when I went to edit the video, I got really sick of counting signs so cut it off after about 17 miles. Make sure you watch until the end to see the statistics. They’re pretty interesting. For you Utahns, this road is probably fairly familiar:
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F48y5Tkeb0E[/tube]
