PLEASE WAIT
PLEASE WAIT investigates how graphic design participates in the organisation of social behaviour through ordinary systems of information, instruction and visual order.
In hospitals, banks, airports, restaurants and government offices, people encounter queue numbers, tickets, signs, arrows and polite instructions. These graphic forms appear neutral and functional, yet they classify individuals, assign positions and direct behaviour.
The project examines this process through three operations: classification, direction and normalisation. From People to Numbers transforms individual names into the administrative identity A018. Invisible Authority uses routes and repeated commands to direct the viewer’s reading path. The Aesthetics of Obedience organises restrictive language into a calm and visually ordered system.
Through posters, tracing-paper layers and printed publications, the project asks how graphic design can make institutional authority appear efficient, reasonable and aesthetically acceptable.
Final poster series exploring how graphic design participates in systems of classification, direction and normalisation within everyday institutional life.
From this point, viewing becomes participation. The reader enters the project’s system of instructions before becoming fully aware that they are following it.
Poster examining how individual identity is absorbed into administrative classification through the code A018.
Poster exploring how graphic sequence, routes and repeated commands direct attention and movement.
Poster examining how restrictive instructions can be normalised through clarity, order and visual elegance.
Three tracing-paper posters layered as one visual system, allowing classification, direction and normalisation to overlap physically through transparency.
Interior spreads documenting the project’s research, visual methodology and development process.
Publication spreads showing how research into mapping, institutional systems and graphic authority informed the visual development of PLEASE WAIT.
Close-up of the translucent poster layers, showing how separate systems of classification, direction and instruction remain partially visible through one another.
Detail of three printed posters physically layered together, exploring how separate graphic systems accumulate through material and repetition.