signage is an art in and of itself and in our increasingly global world, signage that is meaningful to everyone is harder to create than many people think. signage in virtual world builds helps add familiar and expected elements that can add richness to your work. the very nature of many OpenSim regions and grids allows for international visitors from all corners of the Earth (this blog sees visitors from 156 countries)
good signage also helps guide visitors to what you want to showcase. but . . . even for graphic designers it can be challenging to create a unified style for utilitarian-style signs
fortunately, there are a few sites that cater to this and two of them have great creative commons licensed art
the first is the American Institute of Graphic Arts which has 50 signs that are familiar to many people and are in use all over the world. these are fully copyright-free and available here
the second one, The Noun Project, has almost anything you can imagine from Chemical Weapons to Report Card to Guerrilla Gardening. The Noun Project is more of a repository of nice user-created and uploaded iconic symbols, but not necessarily “standard” like the AIGA symbols. however, it’s a great way to create a unified set of signs for your virtual world builds
with symbols that allow adaptation, you can add your own touch by placing them on your own background shape and colour
LOVE The Noun Garden! Great to see it used in a virtual world. I’ve found it’s so easy for designers to become so familiar with their virtual world project that they lose the perspective of a first time user. Signs help.
.. plus, yours are just stinkin’ cute :)
Cathy Arreguin
1 Dec 11 at 10:21 am
awww! i’m gonna blush! thank you =)
signs are quite an art – the British Roadway signs were created by a former secretary in the 1960s – they had her on Top Gear and it was pretty interesting to see how haphazard it all was!
Ener Hax
1 Dec 11 at 10:36 am
Broadening the function portrayed in the screen shot above. it would be somewhat trivial to extend the languages of the signs(the bus notification). Perhaps to french.
Opensim is well placed to do this with its script function osSetDynamicTextureURL
- A simple admin webpage with tick boxes. One is language.
- This sends a message to an in world prim ( llHTTP )
- Prim send messages to all sign prims and each sets links to the “French” signage (osSetDynamicTextureURL).
I use this functionality to send an album cover to an in world prim depending on what artist the shoutcast server is playing. If I introduce a new album is shoutcast, it is all picked up automatically by the inworld script(just linking to the texture web link).
Breen Whitman
1 Dec 11 at 11:55 am
i have yet to play with URL textures but they make a lot of sense (plus you never need to worry about them becoming corrupted)
thanks for the reminder on those =)
Ener Hax
1 Dec 11 at 1:11 pm
[...] and symbols is a good thing and can be done without stepping on your creativity. there are several resources for such and an international agency that sets standards which is the International Organisation [...]
in-world information kiosks at i live in science land
12 Apr 12 at 10:21 pm