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By JEFF MOSIER
ARLINGTON – Cowboys Stadium is packed to its arches with design elements that make fans gawk in amazement.
John Lutz's contributions, however, blend into the surroundings when they're done right and tend to grab visitors' attention only when they get lost.
Lutz, a principal at Selbert Perkins Design, was part of a team that created the look of the signs at the stadium and mapped where all 3,600 of them go – from concourse signs as long as a car to the small female/male symbols on restroom doors.
"Signage is something that people really only notice when it's not working," Lutz said.
With thousands of signs directing tens of thousands of people, there will be plenty of opportunities to test the years of work put into the sign master plan for the Cowboys' $1.15 billion stadium.
Robin Perkins, a Los Angeles-based partner in Selbert Perkins, said the public is probably unaware of the long hours and extensive analysis that goes into a sign program – particularly one this large.
"They just think that it appears," Perkins said.
Work began in early 2007, just a few months after excavation of the seating bowl was completed and construction started. Even now, the signs are still being tweaked.
In the last couple of weeks, workers were adding and subtracting information from signs and adjusting some of their locations based on how they worked for the early concerts and sporting events.
"It's a living, breathing project for at least the first year," said Brett Daniels, a Cowboys spokesman.
But functionality is just one element of a stadium that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has said he hopes will be the second-most recognizable building in the country behind the White House.
"We bring that pragmatic approach to getting people where they need to go," Perkins said, "and then we layer it with an artful approach to telling the story of our client's brand."
Selbert Perkins has worked on signage at theme parks and created the 100-foot tall lighted glass pylons at the entrance to Los Angeles International Airport.
Unifying elements
The most obvious example is in the Cowboys Stadium parking lots. Many lots are labeled with the numbers and names of former Cowboys players who have been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But the planning involved more than just slapping photos on light poles, Lutz said.
He said the pictures were reproduced in a halftone style – a collection of dots of different sizes – to mimic photos from old newspapers. The images also fade a little at some angles to give the impression that fans are peeking into the team's past, Lutz said.
Perkins said the signs tie together the team and the building.
"There's a heroic sense to the architecture of the building," she said, and that extends to the poses on the parking signs.
There were even discussions about who goes where. The decision was made that the Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman lots should go near the main stadium entrance. The Tom Landry lot was placed near Collins Street and Randol Mill Road, one of the area's busiest intersections.
Perkins said every project is unique, but there are common principles that link many of their projects.
The sign design at the stadium and most everywhere else takes a little of its philosophy from the intelligence community. Fans get their information on a need-to-know basis. Perkins said that if there are more than three bits of information on a sign, people will often forget some details before they can use it.
"Less is more," Perkins said, quoting the motto of minimalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Another problem with packing too much information into a single sign is that it encourages pedestrians to stop and read everything. In the middle of a corridor designed to keep a river of people flowing, stopping to read 10 lines of text would cause congestion.
Designers give fans just enough information to get to the next sign, which will steer them to their section, their aisle and their seats.
Signs also have to fit in with the scale of their surroundings.
"If it's too big, it's going to look clumsy," Perkins said. "And if it's too small, it's not going to function."
Lutz said sign designers know from research that 6-inch-tall letters will make a sign visible for about 140 feet for someone with 20/20 vision. If the designers switched from simpler fonts to more elaborate ones, the visibility of the signs would be greatly reduced.
'Subtle variances'
Designers also generally place large directional signs – some as big as 18 feet long in Cowboys Stadium – overhead in the main concourses. In large crowded spaces, Lutz said, overhead signs are the best ways to reach people.
He said that much of the signage in the concourse resembles what might be seen in an airport terminal or train station. Transit facilities have a similar function of moving large crowds as efficiently as possible.
Lutz said that in the suite and club areas, the signs are more likely to resemble those in a luxury hotel. In those areas, few of the overhead signs are used since they would interfere with the pricy light fixtures and custom ceiling designs. The colors in the club areas are also more muted and use blacks to match some of the granite tabletops.
"These are all pretty subtle variances in the sign program, but they really begin to communicate about the experience at each of these levels," Perkins said. "You have the main concourse, which is really about the game, and then these other levels, which really describes another level of experience. ... These are subtle references, but people pick them up."
Perkins said the signs are meant to complement the stadium architecture. They use the same color scheme as the Cowboys and the interior design. Even the angled edges of the signs mirror the angled glass walls on the sides of the stadium.
Most of all, the signs have to do the deceptively complex job of moving 80,000-plus people around a new environment, Perkins said.
"If we don't hear any complaints, we've done our jobs," Perkins said. "We know we're not the show here."
