Universal restroom symbols

Answer 1

This news clipping from 1967 should answer your question:

At Expo, a low neck can avert blushes

By TIMOTHY PLUMPTRE

Globe and Mail Reporter

May 30, 1967

MONTRÉAL -- Expo is having trouble with its sign language. Expo designers, in trying to direct visitors safely and efficiently from one point to another, have presumed a picture is worth a thousand words.

So, rather than emblazon toilet doors, for example, with the words Men, Hommes, Cabballeros and Herren, they have resorted to pictographs simply showing a standing male figure.

Likewise on the women's washrooms they placed a similar pictograph whose femininity could be detected by a slight pinching at the waist and a skirt.

These pictographs, and many others in use on the fair site to indicate everything from cloakrooms to marinas, were designed by Toronto's Paul Arthur, a graphic design consultant of considerable repute.

Trouble soon arose over the washroom symbols. Expo officials kept encountering that worried women who trotted nervously up to a rest room door, examined the pictograph with some puzzlement, reached for a handle, then retreated in blushing confusion as men appeared from inside.

Mr. Arthur conceded that the male-female pictographs didn't seem to quite register at Expo although they had been tested without adverse results in Ottawa. He said the woman might have been a bit more pinched at the waist -- the old design certainly had a rather matronly cast.

However, he deplores the replacement, a woman in a low-necked dress with an array of buttons up the front, and a man in an Ivy League outfit complete with shirt and tie.

"The man and woman now used are distressingly vulgar," he said. "It's the difference between symbol and Mickey Mouse."

The idea of using pictures or symbols to inform and direct has been used for years in multilingual Europe, but it is relatively uncommon in North America.

A survey in Expo's press room showed some designs puzzled journalist covering the fair. One pictograph has a suitcase on it surmounted with a large question mark. One reporter felt this meant you either could, or possibly could not, pick up luggage. (The sign indicates lost and found.) Another reporter nurses a sore arm from straight-arming a door. He thought the sign -- the palm of a hand -- meant push. It meant do not enter.

Another sign shows a hand pointing down at a board with a red line across the hand. Don't go down, someone guessed. Don't touch, it really meant.

However, once the key to the signs has been learned, (and the key is published on maps and in the official guidebook of Expo) the symbols become easy to read and readily identifiable to any nationality.

A big success among Mr. Arthur's designs have been animals which overlook the large Expo parking lots. Overseeing separate sections are beasts like a horse, a moose, an elephant, a hippopotamus or a bear.

The theory is that it is easier to remember that you parked under a bear than to recall that you parked in area A-1 or C-6. And if you can't remember, chances are your children will.

A Montréal taxi driver beamed his approval on the signs last week. "I always park under the hippo," he told the reporter. "My mother-in-law reminds me of the hippo, and I never can forget her, so I always can remember where I've put my car."