A plaque you can read from across the street
The Register's plaques had a name and a year, in letters too small to read from the pavement opposite. The new ones are black enamel, set in small caps, and carry a code that opens the building's page. Prototyped on the press in the print shop, one line of metal type at a time.
The Register has put plaques on buildings since 2001. They are small, oval and bronze, and they say the building's name and the year it was finished. Nobody reads them. You can't, unless you cross the road and stand with your nose almost touching the wall, and nobody on a walk does that.
The new plaques had to work from the pavement opposite. That meant starting with the reader, not the plaque.
Five seconds, eight metres
Sorcha timed people on the Saturday walks. When the group stops at a building, a person looks at it for a while, then glances at the plaque for about five seconds, usually from across the street. A Dublin street is about eight metres wide, kerb to wall.
So the question was: what can you read in five seconds from eight metres, in the rain?
Not much. The building's name, if it is big enough. The architect and the year, if they are short. That's it. Everything else, the history, the note, the photographs, the other names, belongs on the building's page. The plaque's job is to say what the building is, and to get you to that page.
The layout
Each plaque has four lines and a code:
The building's name in small caps, large. The official name, because a plaque is a public record, even if everyone calls it the Accordion.
The architect and the year, smaller: KAVANAGH & ROWE · 1964.
The register number, smaller still: DMR 0412.
The wordmark, at the bottom.
And beside them, a QR code that opens the building's page on the Register's website.
Small caps were the obvious choice, and not only because of our name. A building's name in full capitals is loud, and reading speed drops. In lowercase, the shapes are easier to read, but proper nouns lose their weight. Small caps sit in the middle: they read as a name, calmly, from a distance.
Proofs on the press
This is the part I enjoyed most. In the Copenhagen studio we have Birthe's press and a drawer of twelve-point type with small capitals. A plaque is not a printed card. But a printed card at the right scale tells you very quickly whether a layout works.
So every Friday in June, with Birthe looking over my shoulder, I set a plaque in metal type, printed it on card, enlarged it on the copier to plaque size, and taped it to the wall of the front room. Then I stood across the room, eight metres away, and read it. Birthe had opinions about my letter spacing. She was right every time.
We printed eleven versions. Version seven moved the register number below the architect, which made the name easier to find. Version nine dropped a line about the building's use, because nobody could read it from across the room. Version eleven is the one we are making.
Enamel
The plaques themselves are black vitreous enamel on steel, with white letters fired into the surface: the same material as old street signs, which still look fine after sixty years of Dublin weather. An enamel sign maker in Kilkenny is making the first 600.
The QR code is enamel too, which took some persuading. It has to be large enough to scan from a pavement, and fired accurately enough that every square stays square. The sign maker made three test plaques before she was happy, and then made one more, she said, for luck.
What the code points to
The code holds a web address: the Register's website, then the building's name, then its register number. Leela set the format, and I designed around it. That decision seemed small at the time. It will come back.
