We believe the outdoors is primarily a non reading environment and human/animal instincts play a more dominant role than traditional text signage.

The movement of flags and Dori Poles, we believe, are a part of the graphic visual equation especially in the landscape. It's here that flags and other visual attractors need to be designed into the project initially as attractors and directional navigation elements not decoration.

Most people navigate using either known or directed visual elements: i.e., turn left after the bridge, tree, yellow house, or the XYZ gas station.

Today, in our busy lives those charged with site planning or designing directional programs have forgotten that all animals are attracted to movement and learn early in their lives to recognize shape, movement and color for protection or food.

In the landscape where people do not read, the arrangement of visual attracting elements and flags are just some of the visual attractors that get people's attention.

I believe text should be used more as a secondary element to reinforce or confirm arrival and focal elements and not the primary attractor.

Many design professionals and signage people unknowingly use two dimensional text and graphics both indoors and outdoors as if you were reading a book or paper.

Indoors and especially when reading a magazine, book, letter or menu we have few distractions allowing a better chance to focus on the combinations of letters that make up our words. When designing on paper this process can overshadow the reality outside.

In the outdoors the overload of visual distractions are everywhere making reading and focusing on text even more difficult.

Scale, light, darkness, shadows, glare, background, one's safety, movement, traffic, noise, talking with friends are examples that compete with reading text.

On the street and in man made areas where local language/text is used it can become unreadable to others who do not read the language, therefore these people will look for symbols or other visual clues to determine identification and direction.

Even camouflage looses its effect when moving, in a very visually complex environment a sign that does not have an attractor, color shape or movement many times will blend in with its surroundings and be lost.

Today's fabrics, hardware and printing methods are providing greater resources for truly exciting projects. It is our continued interest and observation of the scale of graphics in the landscape and the effect non-text graphics flags and fabric building products that keeps our clients and others looking to VMD for motivation and direction.

At VMD we believe when it comes to the designed landscape, the visual impact of a non-textual graphic system is primary to a graphic sign system. We look forward to working with you.

Flags...the movement component in the visual impact equation.

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