Modern Sign Language for Urban Sprawl

Wayne Hunt’s specialty is helping people find their way. He’s a graphics designer who entered the field 30 years ago when the work focused on producing neat, function-oriented signs, usually in black and white, that said “entrance” or “exit” or “no parking,” for hospitals and airports.

Today, he and a staff of 16, working from Hunt Design Assn.’s Pasadena headquarters, hop around the globe to work on a water park in Taiwan, a theme park in Japan or a Volkswagen exhibit in Germany. They talk about “comprehensive way-finding” and “brand identity systems” and “place-making.”

Closer to home, Hunt’s dramatic blend of scale, color and typography is stamped on more than 70 projects in the Los Angeles area. His group has designed gateway signs for Old Pasadena, festive graphics for the Pasadena Playhouse District, the Universal Studios marquee and signs and maps for Metro Rail. They’re working on two historic civic spaces: the restoration of El Pueblo near Olvera Street and way-finding signage and interpretive graphics for the Pasadena Civic Center.

Hunt is a passionate spokesman for the emerging field of environmental graphics design. “It’s a clumsy phrase,” he acknowledges, “but it means that we do graphic design for buildings, places and spaces.”

This can include a comprehensive package of signs for every phase of a project, from major entrance marquees to the smallest utility room. Not only do such graphics give directions and provide other information, they also enhance a “sense of place” with theatrical or historically themed visual displays, backdrops, cutouts, logos, packaging and other interpretive materials in an array of materials and colors.

Having convinced the business world that design can enhance almost any building or space, environmental designers are busily transforming retail malls, museums and sports arenas, for better or worse.

Schooled in new materials technologies and the psychology of group behavior, they have, in Hunt’s words, “elevated way-finding to an art and a science.” The result is not only a smoother flow of cars in parking lots and visitors through theme parks, malls and casinos, it can also mean better business.

A good graphics program in a theme park, he says, can help balance the population by circulating visitors from the hot attractions, which don’t need signs, to the quieter areas of the park. “We are doing projects I never would have dreamed of a few years ago,” says Hunt, who helped create Las Vegas’ new Paris Casino Resort’s spectacular turn-of-the-century look with ironwork, stone, wood and gold leaf. “They range from the most basic way-finding to absolutely wacky themes and exhibits.”

Hunt was standing in the Los Angeles Zoo on a hot day, surrounded by bright red, blue and purple enamel animals. It’s one of his favorite creations, the Protect and Respect graphics system in the children’s playground. With information organized into story lines, the animals provide cheerful and accessible zoological information.

Hunt is excited because his firm has been selected to design the first signage and graphics master plan for the zoo, which is in the midst of a major redevelopment program for additional exhibits and a redesigned entrance.

The goal is to replace the present hodgepodge of symbols and graphics and guide visitors smoothly through the zoo, says Lora Lamarca,the zoo’s marketing director. “Wayne not only has an enormous knowledge of signage, he brings his understanding of what catches the attention of adults and children,” she says. For Hunt, it’s the ultimate project. “It’s public, it’s for real people, and it’s in our own backyard!” he exclaimed. “We are high as a kite about it!”

Los Angeles an ‘Accepting City’

Hunt, a boyish 52, is a Midwest transplant who has adopted Los Angeles wholeheartedly, bragging about its eclecticism, its energy and its beauty. “It’s a good place to work--it’s an accepting city,” he says. “And it’s been an incredibly creative environment ever since the movie guys started it.”

He and his wife, urban planner Carla Walecka, are longtime residents of the Mt. Washington area with their daughter, Holly, 9. “We have a simple, modernist house with a commanding view, in a great neighborhood,” says Hunt.

His firm is housed in a high-ceilinged, open 1920s brick building in Pasadena, with four “wonderful Sam Spade offices.” The staff is a mix of designers, draftspersons and programmers.

Hunt says the combination of a good economy and the growing cachet of environmental graphics has provided opportunities for an interesting blend of projects. Some are nuts-and-bolts practical.

His team, for example, has spent seven years reworking the snarl of signs throughout the casinos, restaurants, parking lots and driveways of the mammoth MGM Grand hotel complex that sprawls over 115 acres in Las Vegas. “We just ripped out everything and made fewer, larger signs in very careful language,” he says.

An equally big task was creating a complete roadside sign system for the 4,000-acre Port of Long Beach, which included a new pier-naming system and a better hierarchy of sign types of major and minor roads. And increasingly, he works on leisure-time pursuits. Hunt’s clients include Camp Snoopy at Minneapolis’ gigantic Mall of America and the Apollo Saturn V exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center.

“I think we hit our high note working on Saturn V,” he says. “We got to hang with the astronauts, and we were working with this huge team of lighting designers and architects. They recreated the Apollo program: It’s a dazzling visitor experience.”

“Wayne is one of the top people in the industry,” says Rick Juleen, director of graphics for Las Vegas-based Park Place Entertainment, the world’s largest gaming company.

Other leaders in the growing field include such names as April Greiman and Keith Brith of Los Angeles, Clement Mok and Lucille Tenazas of San Francisco and Ivan Chermayeff and Milton Glaser of New York.

Juleen hired Hunt Associates to create turn-of-the-century Parisian graphics for the Paris Casino Resort, which opened last year. “Wayne’s experience with large projects enables him to assemble a package with all those elements. We needed everything from small signs for restrooms to large feature signs and everything in between.”

Graphics World Then and Now

The graphics world was a much simpler place when Hunt majored in graphic design at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, attracted by an interest in art. He eventually landed in the office of the late John Follis, one of the first environmental designers on the West Coast. “Ironically,” says Hunt, “I was the guy in the office who didn’t do the environmental stuff. I was doing the brochures but watching Follis, who was ahead of the curve. He got hold of Arco for a client and designed a comprehensive program with hundreds of components including carefully chosen colors, signs, all the details. He developed a systems approach to signage. I think I was listening, because everything he talked about is what I still believe in.”

If there was a pivotal moment when graphics escaped the boundaries of signs and became part of the environment itself, he says, it was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Rejecting the traditional red, white and blue, the Olympic committee chose a decor theme of avant-garde cardboards and nylons in bright pinks, greens and oranges for street banners, with a hot pink for signs and ticket booths, and bright aqua, orange and yellows on everything from programs to street banners to paper cups.

“It was bright and strong and very heavy on graphics,” says Hunt. “It was designed to look good on TV and opened a new chapter on the possibilities of environmental graphics.”

Designer Deborah Sussman of Sussman/Prejza& Co. in Culver City, who created the pioneering graphics, recalled the initial outcry over the radical new approach. “We called it ‘The Look,’ ” she says. “It wasn’t just signs, it was everything--what you walked on, ate out of, tickets, everything that could be designed. It made us globally visible.”

Not everyone is pleased with the prospect of a world that is so design-heavy that even ATM machines are developing themes. Environmental design, say critics, is too often ratcheting up the commercialization of everyday life.

David Shenk, a New York-based critic of technology culture, warns about the overload possibilities. “I’m in favor of well-planned design, but it seems like an abuse of this would be a total nightmare. You’re using it to commercialize and electrify every possible corner of our lives.” There’s a price we pay, says Shenk, every time we take a natural place or a public space and let it be branded in some way. “Someone has bought our attention.”

Hunt acknowledges the legitimacy of such fears but points out that the proliferation of design is part of an evolutionary spiral. He’s the author of “Urban Entertainment Graphics” (Madison Square Press, 1997), which documents 60 comprehensively designed malls, parks and arenas around the globe. The richly illustrated book drives home his point that graphic design methods are being applied everywhere today, from restaurants to science centers.

Consumer acceptance ultimately drives the market, says Hunt. A missionary for “real life design” as opposed to digital design, he deplores the idea of attendance falling off at zoos and museums because a CD-ROM offers an experience that may be more compelling.

“The average 11-year-olds today are so media-savvy they’re not going to look at a static environment,” he says. “You just aren’t going to be able to build a boring museum anymore.”

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Connie Koenenn can be reached at connie.koenenn@latimes.com.