Street Graffiti

When I first enrolled at the University of Delaware, my major was “Graphic and Advertising Design.” Not exactly the most elegant title, but people pretty much understood what it meant. (Which was I was an art major who actually planned on making a living.) Sometime during my four years at U of D, the name of the major changed to “Visual Communications.” That sounded nicer (and was probably a better description of what I was studying), but was harder to explain (especially to my parents).

I never embraced the whole “Visual Communications” professional label. I usually refer to myself as a graphic artist (because graphic designer just sounds weird to me). Maybe it was because the term always seemed so non-specific. Sign language is visual communication. Stop lights are visual communication. Red church doors are a form of visual communication. In fact, anything marked with colors and symbols is visual communication.

Which brings me to the water main that runs past the front of my home that the local water company is going to start replacing any day now. I assume the water main is at least as old as the house which was built in the early 1950s, so it is probably due for an upgrade. And, in preparation for the water main replacement, our street (and the curbs and the sidewalks and some of our lawns) has been documented by photography and marked up with an impressive display of multi-colored hieroglyphs (with the occasional little flag thrown into the mix). My neighbors and I figured out pretty quickly that the blue marks meant water, but the meaning of some of the other colors just eluded us. After a quick Google search (I love Google), we discovered there was a standard color lexicon for communicating what was going on under our street (and our sidewalks and our lawns). According to this article from Smithsonian (I love Smithsonian), yellow refers to gas lines and green marks the sewers (okay, not the color I would have chosen for sewers, but no one asked me). It is a visual communications system of symbols and colors that utility companies (and anyone who thinks to do a Google search) can decipher.

So now when you see those marks in the street, you know that they mean something to someone. As a graphic artist (and a visual communicator), I think that is pretty cool.