Is a Landmark Sign Important?

We went to a beautiful town outside of the city and were surprised by its beauty . There were beautiful parks and the place was near the sea so there were fishing available for the residents including the tourists. We spent the entire day there and enjoyed it but we wasted so much time exploring places in the town that were not attractions at all but common town surroundings.

We would wander from place to place looking for the landmarks that were marked in our map. There was still no Google Maps then and even if we had it we would have a hard time looking for these landmarks because they blended with the town’s surroundings. The town to their disadvantage look like any town we have seen.

It is funny that we do not even know the name of the town due to the lack of signs. The street name signs were hard to locate and see. So we mostly stayed in the area near the sea because for example even if we wanted to taste the unique foods in the area we could not find them in the map. The sea and the wharf were all we had as reference. We do not even know the name of the wharf.

The one place which gave us information about this place by the sea was the sign which states the name of the entire place near the sea. That is all. Although the wharf by the sea was remarkable it was similar to the other wharfs we have visited. The only thing we judged unique to the place was the sign which identified the place.

We did not take any pictures of the place except for the sign. We posed near the sign and took pictures of ourselves. This is our only memory of the place. If we were to revisit our memories of the place all we had to do was search for the name of the place using the old pictures we took as reference.

This Situation is Not Unique

This is a common thing about landmarks and tourist areas. The people who manage these places spend a lot of resources in making these places beautiful for tourists to come in and be a source of revenue for the locals. They however do not adequately inform the tourists of the great things about these places.

What happens is that the tourists do not have any idea of what to make up of these places. Google Maps is helpful for identifying buildings and for showing the Street View of the places. However it cannot tell us if anything is worth seeing in a certain structure unless the owners inform them which many do not.

For example I visited a botanical garden where there are small identifiers placed on the different trees and plants in it. I might be helpful to a tourist like me to know the names of these plant and trees but not much helpful to anyone seeing my pictures together with these plants and trees because the identifiers are too small and hardly legible to be seen in pictures.

If these identifiers were designed to look better in social media pictures these plants and trees would gain more publicity and might even become famous when people search online details about them. There is for example a tree there that is so special that it has to have its own enclosure yet people fail to see its importance because people do not know anything about it especially in social media.

The place was also so large that I could have been lost there without other people around. The only way I was able to get out of the big garden was by following other people and by looking at the tall buildings from afar which informs me where the exit of the park could be found. There are accounts of people online being lost in many parks around the world as well.

A concrete example would be the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the USA were the names of famous celebrities are embedded along 15 blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and 3 blocks of Vine Street in Hollywood. These are just names embedded in footpaths yet they became famous landmarks.

Another example would be a plaque the size of a small book embedded outside the wall of a building honouring a famous person from another country. People from that country who visit the place would have their picture taken with it to show their pride. If the building owners would install more of these plaques honouring other people from more countries the building would become more famous worldwide.

They Cheap But Effective

These relatively simple and cheap signs give even unimportant places significance. You will see many online pictures of people travelling in remote places taking pictures of themselves near signs identifying the place. They basically want to tell people seeing their picture that: “I have been to this place whose name is…”.

They know that taking pictures of other things like houses and nature for example could not be enough to tell people that they have achieved reaching a place because houses and nature are so ordinary in the eyes of many unless they are quite unique and could not be found elsewhere except in that place.

This is the function of these signs. They inform people of your achievement in reaching a place that probably the viewers of their pictures have not reached before no matter how insignificant a place could be. Many people use for example train stations and they are not extraordinary but if a person takes a picture together with the name of a train station then it becomes a symbol of their achievement no matter how normal looking it is.

Conclusion

Those who manage landmarks and other tourist places must improve the signs they put in them. They not only bring clarity to what these landmarks and tourist places are especially on what they have to offer but these simple signs can be a landmark on to themselves as well.