Estonian Heritage Plaque

I took a picture of this plaque while staying in the Estonian village of Käsmu. It’s in Estonian and English and the circular design lends itself perfectly to this bi-lingual sign. The symbol in the middle feels vaguely Celtic and it screams heritage trail, but in a good way.

I found it on the door of a chapel which was being used to house a photo exhibition of all the people in the village.

Käsmu was originally populated mostly by sea captains and has some wonderful wooden houses, but during the Soviet era the sea was fenced off and the seafaring industry went into decline. It’s now been revitalised as a tourist village and a haven for writers and artists.

I can’t help feeling it would have looked a bit better like this though… oops

A simple multi-lingual sign in Brussels

Our first example is not going to win any design awards, but I’ve picked it because it highlights some of the basic interesting points to consider in multi-lingual design.

It’s a small sign on the main door of a major Belgian department store in Brussels which most shoppers probably don’t even register consciously. It uses four languages; French, Dutch, German and English respectively. And here it is.

Using four languages is slightly unusual here as most signs in Brussels are bi-lingual (Dutch / French), but the most interesting feature of this sign is that they have used flags to indicate which section of text relates to which language. This is probably because the text of the sign is translated into four languages and the use of non-text elements helps the reader to quickly identify which section of the sign is “their” bit.

But we often see flags used on bi-lingual and multi-lingual Web sites to help a reader pick the language in which they want to use the Web site so it’s not an unusual design technique.

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