Someone has caught on to this. Recent standards I was interested in (electrical stuff) were full price from EVS, or at least close enough that I didn't care.
Very annoying, I hate the motherfucking cartel bastards that are the IEC. (Tell you how I really feel?)
This is one of those standards I wish we could just unlock as free. We are surrounded by these symbols due to their obvious utility, to the point where I routinely see them used unknowingly on things that cannot possibly be legal given the copyrights inherent in the original source material, yet because many people not working in an industry that comes across such standards documents as part of standards compliance... may not even have realised they come from a standard they have to pay for!
They go on to produce work containing these symbols in varying degrees of modification for so many reasons, its just bloody pointless at this stage to keep these locked away.
We live in a world plastered with these symbols, the very purpose of which is to be an international agreed upon symbolic language for safety and utility, yet we lock them away behind a nominal paywall that cannot possibly be a lucrative revenue stream... its just daft bordering on hypocritical.
Id go so far as to say these symbols they belong in the open standardised like Unicode, for all to use and easily available for clear compatibility, delegated from ISO to another body that can be more open if their hands are tied for some reason.
> given the copyrights inherent in the original source material
It's not obvious to me that (under US law) these are copyright protected. It may be a similar case as typefaces vs. fonts. The language on the ISO website suggests, at least to me, that you are paying for particular files in particular formats and are not licensing a protected symbol. Also the language in the ISO standards describes abstract symbols, and afaik there is no normative requirement to use the exact images from the standard / ISO to be compliant.
ISO is a "traditional" international standards body whose members are sovereign entities (well, national standards bodies on behalf of those sovereign entities). If they'd like to pay ISO to give this stuff away I'm sure that would be fine.
Conveniently your government (as one of those sovereign entities) also decides what the laws about "intellectual property" are where you live. If you live in a democracy of some sort, this is in some sense up to you.
But if you live somewhere with like, poverty and kids dying of preventable diseases and so on (which you do, that's basically all of the sovereign entities regardless of whether they've got democracy), I can already guess why they didn't fix those, and the reason to not make ISO standards freely available will be similar: That would cost money.
Will the phone symbol need to be updated since phones haven't looked like that in a long time? It could be tough to explain the "emergency phone" one, for example, to a kid.
Probably because it's pretty obvious it's a phone, since it has a distinguishable shape and all. As silhouettes used in these signs are rather simple, I would imagine a "modern" phone would look like a million other things.
Also, do you know how telegraphs look? Have you ever used one?
You mean the phone app icon? The symbol that's in the middle of the Whatsapp logo? I think it'll be fine for a while. Probably for as long as physical emergency phones exist.
Peppa uses a cordless phone (but not "mobile", it uses a short range transceiver so that you can wander around your home with it) and her mother calls the Sheep household which has a more traditional phone like the pictographs.
you figure, kids still know what a floppy disk represents despite the tech being obsolete for 20 years now. skeuomorphism means designs like phone handsets retain some informational value long after the actual, original use is gone.
Some of them are terrible. "Release the ropes" (lifeboat) for eaxmple, as well as others, only mean something if you already know what they mean. A warning sign should be instinctive to most of the population.
It's as pointless as when you see a "danger" sign with the word "danger" underneath to explain what the sign means :-)
You have to consider that these are placed next to the thing they're showing. They're obviously a lot harder to understand when you look at them detached from the thing.
> A warning sign should be instinctive to most of the population.
Isn't it good to also have standarized signs for warnings that are meaningful for a smaller subset of the population (e.g. "rapid movement of workpiece in press brake machine")? It's not like you're going to see this sign on the street anyway. And if you happen to see the sign somewhere and don't understand it, at least you understand that it's a warning sign and know that you should ask someone what it means.
> Some of them are terrible. "Release the ropes" (lifeboat) for eaxmple, as well as others, only mean something if you already know what they mean.
Yes but the intended audience isn't the general public, it's going to be lifeboat crew and operators, and these folks will likely be trained to interpret these signs.
What is the best way to print these? An inkjet and some glossy paper? How does one preserve them when exposed to the sun, rain, ice and snow? Does someone yet make a consumer level printer that can print onto vinyl stickers?
Don't print them onto vinyl, cut them out of vinyl. They're all single-color or two-color with no gradients, so they're designed to be cut.
You can get a cheap little USCutter MH series for under $300, blades from aliexpress for $15, and a few rolls of vinyl and transfer tape from Wensco for about $20/ea. That's well within the price of a good printer, and the results are substantially higher contrast and more durable.
(Friends don't let friends pay the Cricut tax. Commercial-grade machines and materials are vastly cheaper in volume.)
Your local hackerspace/makerspace likely already has one.
Slippery surface exists because of stupid architects / builders / customers ordering buildings. </s> In Norway, there are a bunch of grocery (and other) stores that put those signs out when it's raining or snowing outside, i.e., the floor is likely wet. How about thinking upfront and choosing a non-slippery floor material, even if it doesn't look "fancy".
Cheap, can pressure wash, if you make the appropriate grooving to allow thermal expansion it will last, but is easy to repair anyway. Can dye with any color you want too.
If you want an environmental-friendly alternative, you can do the same with clay mixed with some binder.
Pressure washing indoors would probably make a big mess of a grocery store though. Grocery store floors are chosen to be flat and impermeable to make spills easy to clean, but flat and impermeable tends to mean slippery when wet.
Perhaps linoleum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleum) or some newer material with similar properties? I've used older showers with linoleum floor and it was not slippery at all.
Dunno, not an expert in this area, but even so, using polished tiles should be obviously a bad idea to anyone stopping to think about something more than looks.
Indeed. I run a university fablab/machine shop and we prohibit work gloves on all rotary tools (lathes, mills, press drill, bench grinders) and band saws due to drawing in risk. Not just gloves, but all long sleeves, long hair, jewelry, watches, etc.
We do allow thin nitrile gloves in cases where someone would want to avoid skin contact with eg coolant or cutting oil.
See this 2011 accident at Yale where someone died when their long hair got wrapped up in a lathe. Stuff of nightmares.
Gloves can get caught in moving machinery. If your hand is inside the glove, your hand, arm, or maybe your whole body might also get violently yanked into that machine along with the glove.
[2] Yes I know it's probably for a lighter-than-air gas hazard in confined space hazard, but in reality why would this pictogram be chosen instead of a textual sign like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Confined... and possibly also use of M047 Use breathing equipment (SCBA) and if you really want to get a message across, also W016 Toxic material (even if its not toxic this sign says "keep the hell out" like no other sign does).
1) Skeletons of divers and a personification of death. The skeleton with a sickle thing might not be culturally universal, but the message is probably clear enough.
2) It gives clear rational justifications for itself, for the rebellious who might otherwise question a command given without justification.
3) It's a custom sign. Sometimes it seems warning signs are slapped on things out of an overabundance of caution because somebody has a stack of signs and nowhere else to put them. Not this sign. Somebody went out of their way to have this sign custom made, so it must be serious.
I too think it is good sign for the reasons you describe. However at least with cave diving the hazards only present themselves after someone has undergone training and gained experience which would make abundantly clear what type of hazards exist.
I think one of the worst types of hazards and one of the hardest to signpost is presented by low head dams. Signs are absolutely needed to make it abundantly clear it is not a half baked risk of serious injury or possible death. It's certain death. Signs need to describe and illustrate why it's a certain death because people coming across the hazard will typically have no idea what hazard lies in front of them. Signs need to describe why you can't save someone trapped in a recirculating current or you too will have a certain death. Use of generic signs would likely be downplayed because there there is a saturation of other swift water related (don't swim here/strong undercurrent/risk of flash flooding/etc) signs all over the place that mean people may be complacent.
For occupational hazards, I would suspect that crush hazards and asphyxiation hazards (confined spaces such as tanks and silos etc) are amongst the worst types of hazards. They're typically very hard hazards to control for (can't just screen/shield the hazard away from operators), it's easy for even well trained people to make mistakes, and hazards can frequently be hard to determine by operators.
From a bit of looking around, I suspect it may applicable for lifeboats used in oil/gas applications where the lifeboat could be launched into waters engulfed in flames from burning oil/gas on the surface of the water. There is a video demonstration at [1].
Even though people working in the proximity of a fire resistant lifeboat would already be comprehensively trained to operate said lifeboat, perhaps they've found that people forget and need a reminder to turn on fire suppression sprinklers in the... heat of the moment.
I've seen those signs during construction works on the local tram system where they've switched off sections of the overhead line equipment – at least in those cases the switch handles are also protected with a padlock.
Effluent, nice word. I don't think I've seen it before.
I'm a bit surprised my old favorite "don't stick your hand in the lawn mower blades" symbol isn't on this list. One of those warnings that really shouldn't be necessary, but obviously is.
58 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadI'm glad that the UN didn't go with these, since interoperability of safety symbology should not be restricted to everyone but poor people
I just wish the UN's efforts went further than just chemicals
I suspect you would need to pay if you were manufacturing these signs for resale, to ensure your signs were ISO compliant.
I see its time for the weekly reminder that one does not need to purchase standards directly from ISO.
What you do is you go buy the "regionalised" (a.k.a. "EN-ISO") version which, for all intents and purposes, is exactly the same document.
EN-ISO versions of ISO documents are available at far, far lower prices.
See for example the online shop at the Estonian Centre for Standards and Accreditation[1]. You don't have to live in Estonia or Europe to buy there.
[1] https://www.evs.ee/en/
Very annoying, I hate the motherfucking cartel bastards that are the IEC. (Tell you how I really feel?)
They go on to produce work containing these symbols in varying degrees of modification for so many reasons, its just bloody pointless at this stage to keep these locked away.
- ISO 3758
- ISO 3864
- ISO 7000
- ISO 7001
- ISO 7010
and more.
You can even browse them all... https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search yet you cannot use them without paying.
We live in a world plastered with these symbols, the very purpose of which is to be an international agreed upon symbolic language for safety and utility, yet we lock them away behind a nominal paywall that cannot possibly be a lucrative revenue stream... its just daft bordering on hypocritical.
Id go so far as to say these symbols they belong in the open standardised like Unicode, for all to use and easily available for clear compatibility, delegated from ISO to another body that can be more open if their hands are tied for some reason.
It's not obvious to me that (under US law) these are copyright protected. It may be a similar case as typefaces vs. fonts. The language on the ISO website suggests, at least to me, that you are paying for particular files in particular formats and are not licensing a protected symbol. Also the language in the ISO standards describes abstract symbols, and afaik there is no normative requirement to use the exact images from the standard / ISO to be compliant.
If you are producing warning signs for selling you might want to buy it to get the true colour data etc.
Conveniently your government (as one of those sovereign entities) also decides what the laws about "intellectual property" are where you live. If you live in a democracy of some sort, this is in some sense up to you.
But if you live somewhere with like, poverty and kids dying of preventable diseases and so on (which you do, that's basically all of the sovereign entities regardless of whether they've got democracy), I can already guess why they didn't fix those, and the reason to not make ISO standards freely available will be similar: That would cost money.
Edit: this is discussed on https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/8586/can-i...
Also, do you know how telegraphs look? Have you ever used one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jil0WCh_UoQ
Peppa uses a cordless phone (but not "mobile", it uses a short range transceiver so that you can wander around your home with it) and her mother calls the Sheep household which has a more traditional phone like the pictographs.
It's as pointless as when you see a "danger" sign with the word "danger" underneath to explain what the sign means :-)
Isn't it good to also have standarized signs for warnings that are meaningful for a smaller subset of the population (e.g. "rapid movement of workpiece in press brake machine")? It's not like you're going to see this sign on the street anyway. And if you happen to see the sign somewhere and don't understand it, at least you understand that it's a warning sign and know that you should ask someone what it means.
Yes but the intended audience isn't the general public, it's going to be lifeboat crew and operators, and these folks will likely be trained to interpret these signs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7010#/media/File:ISO_7010_...
You can get a cheap little USCutter MH series for under $300, blades from aliexpress for $15, and a few rolls of vinyl and transfer tape from Wensco for about $20/ea. That's well within the price of a good printer, and the results are substantially higher contrast and more durable.
(Friends don't let friends pay the Cricut tax. Commercial-grade machines and materials are vastly cheaper in volume.)
Your local hackerspace/makerspace likely already has one.
https://theconstructor.org/practical-guide/how-to-make-a-con...
Cheap, can pressure wash, if you make the appropriate grooving to allow thermal expansion it will last, but is easy to repair anyway. Can dye with any color you want too.
If you want an environmental-friendly alternative, you can do the same with clay mixed with some binder.
Dunno, not an expert in this area, but even so, using polished tiles should be obviously a bad idea to anyone stopping to think about something more than looks.
Warning that a bull is in the area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ISO_7010_W034_warning;_bu...
Don't wear gloves (any idea when this would be the case? Usually it's don't wear a specific kind (like latex vs rubber) of glove): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ISO_7010_P028.svg
[1] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:grs:7010:P028
We do allow thin nitrile gloves in cases where someone would want to avoid skin contact with eg coolant or cutting oil.
See this 2011 accident at Yale where someone died when their long hair got wrapped up in a lathe. Stuff of nightmares.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/nyregion/yale-student-die...
M055—To induce a temper-tantrum in the kid, take away the box of cookies they've half eaten.
W041—Shower every day or you'll be a loner surrounded by a swarm of flies.[2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040902165319/https://smithplan... (note: not the original site and I'm not sure where the meme originated from, but this site appears to have the largest collection of examples from a quick search)
[2] Yes I know it's probably for a lighter-than-air gas hazard in confined space hazard, but in reality why would this pictogram be chosen instead of a textual sign like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Confined... and possibly also use of M047 Use breathing equipment (SCBA) and if you really want to get a message across, also W016 Toxic material (even if its not toxic this sign says "keep the hell out" like no other sign does).
1) Skeletons of divers and a personification of death. The skeleton with a sickle thing might not be culturally universal, but the message is probably clear enough.
2) It gives clear rational justifications for itself, for the rebellious who might otherwise question a command given without justification.
3) It's a custom sign. Sometimes it seems warning signs are slapped on things out of an overabundance of caution because somebody has a stack of signs and nowhere else to put them. Not this sign. Somebody went out of their way to have this sign custom made, so it must be serious.
I think one of the worst types of hazards and one of the hardest to signpost is presented by low head dams. Signs are absolutely needed to make it abundantly clear it is not a half baked risk of serious injury or possible death. It's certain death. Signs need to describe and illustrate why it's a certain death because people coming across the hazard will typically have no idea what hazard lies in front of them. Signs need to describe why you can't save someone trapped in a recirculating current or you too will have a certain death. Use of generic signs would likely be downplayed because there there is a saturation of other swift water related (don't swim here/strong undercurrent/risk of flash flooding/etc) signs all over the place that mean people may be complacent.
For occupational hazards, I would suspect that crush hazards and asphyxiation hazards (confined spaces such as tanks and silos etc) are amongst the worst types of hazards. They're typically very hard hazards to control for (can't just screen/shield the hazard away from operators), it's easy for even well trained people to make mistakes, and hazards can frequently be hard to determine by operators.
M043 — start the water spray for the lifeboat (lifeboat launch sequence)
Why do you spray a lifeboat with water?
I have seen people disturb the water in a pool before a high diver jumps, so I think this applies here aswell.
Even though people working in the proximity of a fire resistant lifeboat would already be comprehensively trained to operate said lifeboat, perhaps they've found that people forget and need a reminder to turn on fire suppression sprinklers in the... heat of the moment.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXYL-X4SHN4
Strikes me as the "Do not push" sign above the large red button.
Effluent, nice word. I don't think I've seen it before.
I'm a bit surprised my old favorite "don't stick your hand in the lawn mower blades" symbol isn't on this list. One of those warnings that really shouldn't be necessary, but obviously is.
Edit: Here is one which looks slightly more dramatic: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_89ut-hdzymw/R3zqFZq58yI/AAAAAAAAE6...