COVID-19 Signage Project

COVID-19 Signage Project: Changes to Normal Operations

 
Sign in plastic vertical sign holder on a counter: "NOTICE PRODUCT TASTINGS ARE SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY." Store magazine titled *Taste* on counter in front of the sign.

May 28, 2021
Fine Wine and Good Spirits
Southridge Plaza, State College, PA
iPhone 7

Sign in produce section of a grocery store: IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN PROPER SOCIAL DISTANCING, WE ASK THAT YOU DO NOT SHUCK YOUR CORN IN-STORE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

September 3, 2021
Weis Markets
Bellefonte, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

Pharmacy counter with two containers of pens (repurposed orange pill canisters). Left container labeled CLEAN PENS. Right container labeled USED PENS.

October 27, 2022
Weis Markets
Bellefonte, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

Printed sign taped to the front of a shelf of toys: Kid to Kid FOR YOUR SAFETY Do not allow children to touch the toys unless you are ready to purchase. We know that's hard and we're sorry. Let's stay healthy!

December 18, 2021
Kid to Kid
State College, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

Printed sign affixed to a brushed metal plate: To help decrease the spread of COVID-19, the water fountains in our stores have been turned off. Sorry for the inconvenience. Bottled Water is available to buy at the Restaurant and Bistro. Ikea logo.

October 16, 2021
Ikea
Conshohocken, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

This set took me a while to finish posting, but I finally got there. It's partly due to time constraints—I post another picture into a set when I get a free moment, and as brief as it may take to post a photo, write caption info + ALT text, and share it on a few platforms, time's been in short supply lately.

A quirk of this particular set, too, is that what I'd originally classified as "Changes to Normal Business Operations" previously included signs with now enough fellows to fit into posts and categories of their own, to be posted later, including in particular Staffing and Supply Chain-related signage.

One of my models for this project, Neil Kramer's Quarantine in Queens, seems to be nearing its end, though my own (while not nearly as prolific) is likely to continue for some time. Part of this is, once again, due to time constraints—I have many more sets of photos collected that I have yet to post.

Part of it, too, is the lingering nature of signage. It ages over time and shows that age, and depending on the particular one, it's also likely to just continue to hang out there.

These particular signs are probably the outliers—I think the water fountains at Ikea are running again, you can pick up the toys at Kid2Kid, and as far as I recall, corn shucking at Weis is once again permitted.

The ones that seem likeliest to linger are the floor markers. I continue to see them, though I think they're much less frequently adhered to than they were a few years ago.

COVID-19 Signage Project: Wear and Tear

 

To view all COVID-19 Signage Project posts, click here.

Worn down red social distancing floor marker. Rectangular shape. Legible words in white text: Stay here to be …. Feet apart

June 27, 2022 | CVS on South Atherton Street, State College, PA | iPhone 12 Mini

Worn down blue social distancing floor marker. Circle shape. White text at center: PLEASE STAY 6FT APART. Above: PHYSICAL DISTANCING IN EFFECT. Yellow arrows pointing forwards, backwards, left, and right.

May 30, 2021 | Penn State Berkey Creamery | iPhone 12 Mini

1. Worn down social distancing floor marker, a red square, on a tiled floor. At center, white icon of a pair of shoes. Above, white text: PLEASE KEEP AT LEAST 6FT. APART. To the left and right of shoes: STAY SAFE. Towards bottom of photo, legs and fe

February 10, 2022 | Cove Pizza, State College PA | iPhone 12 Mini

Worn down social distancing floor marker, a red square, on a tiled floor. The marker is heavily scuffed and scratched. At center, white icon of a pair of shoes. Above, white text: PLEASE KEEP AT LEAST 6FT. APART. To the left and right of shoes: STAY

August 26, 2022 | Cove Pizza, State College PA | iPhone 12 Mini

Concrete floor with worn black social distancing floor marker with white she icons and text. A doormat covers the right half. Photographer’s sneakers and jeans visible in lower left.

August 5, 2021 | The Cheese Shop of Portland (ME) | iPhone 12 Mini

Scuffed hardwood floor. Blue circle social distancing floor marker, heavily scratched. Black shoe icons at center. Above in white: SOCIAL DISTANCING. Along the circle’s edge: STAND HERE, with 6 FEET repeated all along the edge.

December 7, 2021 | Tait Farm Foods, Boalsburg, PA | iPhone 12 Mini

Dark grey painted concrete floor. Bare concrete revealed towards the bottom of the frame due to foot traffic. A circle of bare concrete is visible at center, where a floor marker’s removal peeled off paint. Photographer’s shoe at bottom center.

August 5, 2021 | The Cheese Shop of Portland (ME) | iPhone 12 Mini

COVID-19 Signage Project: Masks Required

This is the first post of a long-term photo project on the signs of the COVID–19 pandemic, filtered through the narrow constraints of my own firsthand experience. You can read more about the project here. 

For a first post, I feel obliged to feature instances of those signs in businesses that say, unequivocably, that you must wear a mask. Usually this comes in the form of the words “Masks Required.” 

When I started the project, I thought I’d be able to lump all signs with direction on masking into a single post, but as the pandemic and the project have grown longer and bigger (perhaps in both cases more than anyone would truly desire), I’ve found that I can subdivide these into fairly narrow categories. As an English PhD candidate, I can’t help but read sings like this very closely. “Masks Required” is different from “Masks Encouraged” is different from (one of my personal favorites thus far) “Governor Tom Wolf has ordered that all customers must wear a mask when entering our business.” 

At this time of writing, these signs have actually become something of the past—our local municipalities have rescinded their mask mandates due to a drop in cases. That in itself is an example of how this project has shifted over time—when I first started drafting this post in January, masks were still required and the Omicron variant was tearing through the country.

Anyway, here’s Masks Required.

Laminated sign styled like a Magic: The Gathering card. It reads“ EQUIP MASK. Mask Required. [Magic tap symbol] when tapped, mask is optional.”

Mask Required | December 28, 2021 | Master Goblin Games, State College, PA

Master Goblin Games is a new gaming store in downtown State College, and their graphics game is on point. Here, they’ve riffed on the format and language of a Magic: The Gathering equipment type card.

“Equip” is an ability on a card that’s meant to represent (you guessed it) a piece of equipment. It means that you put the equipment on a creature, and it usually improves its bearer’s characteristics in some way. Equip Mask is an action that will enhance you, its bearer. 

The circle with an arrow is it is the “tap symbol.” In Magic, you “tap” a card by turning it sideways, and this usually indicates that either the card has attacked this turn, or that whatever action comes after the symbol cannot be taken again until the card is no longer tapped. 

Unlike “Equip Mask,” the tap symbol and doesn’t have quite as much meaning in spoken English, so the uninitiated reader has to intuit what the arrow-in-circle symbol and the term “tapped” means.

Here’s what an actual Magic: The Gathering equipment card looks like.

Magic: The Gathering card featuring a silver half-mask. Cardname is "Mask of Avacyn." Body text reads: Equipped creature gets +1/+1 and hex proof. Equip {3}. "It hides the face and protects the soul."

Note, the Mask of Avacyn might hide the face and protect the soul, but there’s no way that that thing is stopping 95 percent of airborne particles.

Laminated yellow sign, worn and aged, reading "Following CDC guidance, customers *must* mask inside, regardless of vaccination status. Thank you for your cooperation."

Must Mask | December 7, 2021 | Tait Farm Foods, Centre Hall, PA

I have a separate album full of shots of signs that show their wear and tear, and this one may need to pull double-duty. I like here the images at top and bottom that feel to me on-brand for Tait Farm Foods. The language of direction includes both the appeal to authority (“Following CDC guidance”) as well as some very assertive ownership over the direction that they’re posting. They’re not just saying this because they have to—the underlined must makes clear to me that they’re serious. Outside of the sign’s text content, I do like the story that the weathering on this sign tells. It’s laminated, so its makers intended to protect it from the elements, but perhaps on account of the fold or some other gap in the top edge, and time, elements have made it in anyway. It’s been a long pandemic. The only other thing I’d love to see in this sign is, instead of a white plastic thumb tack, a rusty nail to match the two above.

Attention | June 18, 2021 | Kondu, State College, PA

This one doubles in the “sign that’s been around longer than anticipated” bucket, but then, most COVID–19 signs do nowadays. 

I noticed the name “displays2go” in the lower-right corner, and it turns out that a version of this poster is available for download online as well. Displays2go, a sign company, has made available a whole page of free COVID–19 poster images that you can download and print, from vaccinations and masks required to now hiring signs.

Here’s the current version of the sign I had photographed:

Sign reading "Please Wear Face Coverings Inside If Not Fully Vaccinated Against Covid-19 You are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the final vaccine dose

Assuming that the version I photographed is a predecessor to this one, it’s interesting to see how the language has changed. “Attention: Face Mask or Covering is Required Upon Entry” is absolute, whereas the current version adds the vaccination qualifier (irrelevant in my own municipality) and the information bit about what is considered “fully vaccinated.”

Black and white sign posted on a door. Includes a mask icon and the text: “NOTICE FACE MASK REQUIRED.”

NOTICE: FACE MASK REQUIRED | December 3, 2021 | Comic Swap, State College, PA

This sign doesn’t just say that face masks are required, but the bold typeface and the white-on-black NOTICE headliner let you know that they mean it. 

Like the above sign, this one also has a URL that points to its origins. This one was provided by the Brevard County government in Florida. Perhaps befitting Florida local politics, that site also provides a FACE MASK NOT REQUIRED sign.

Large printed sign reading: “Visitors are required to wear face coverings or masks at all times. Disposable masks are available at the front desk. Maintain a 6-foot distance between yourself and other visitors at all times.” Blue background. Icons re

Visitors are required to wear face coverings or masks at all times. | September 19, 2021 | Palmer Museum of Art, State College, PA

COVID-19 Signage Project: Introduction

This is the first post from my long-term photography project titled “COVID–19 Signage Project”[^1]. It’s a collection of photos I’ve been taking since roughly March of 2020, and the subjects are pieces of printed signage related to the COVID–19 pandemic. While I probably took the earliest of these photos because I find simple, straight shots of signage inherently interesting, I started collecting them more deliberately as summer 2020 got closer. That summer I’d be teaching an online course in technical writing, and the course emphasizes that technical writing exists all around us, and that it tends to reflect the culture and values of the persons and organizations that produce it[^2].

This made me wonder: In the midst of a pressing, public health crisis, what are the ways in which signage might capture the culture and values of the persons and organizations that produce it?

2021-09-16 Origins and Project Description - 2.jpeg

They might be captured in the tone and colors of the signage, indicating a company’s interest in maintaining coherence between this signage and their brand identity (Sheetz does a great job with this), or, they might be captured in the language used to communicate the message. After all, there is a difference between “No Mask? No Service!” and “Governor Tom Wolf has ordered that all customers must wear a mask when entering our business.”

Nuances of sentence structure, tone, and punctuation say a whole darn lot, especially during a crisis and especially in a medium in which the audience’s attention span and the amount of available display real estate are limited.

Outside of culture and values, the ways that businesses produced these signs also indicates the company’s resources in the midst of this disaster. For a large chain, signs might be printed as colorful window decals. For a small local bar owner, the available means might be a sharpie, a piece of posterboard, and a procedure mask.

I ultimately didn’t carve out a spot for using these in my technical writing course, so the purpose shifted from collecting images for use in class to collecting images for an ongoing photography project, and the form of it has since been influenced by interviews I listened to featuring photographers Scott Strazzante and Neil Kramer. The scope of it has also ultimately gotten a bit wider, as my purpose has expanded to include documenting in my own way the shifting winds of the pandemic and the state and business responses to it over the course of over a year.

Like many, I would have thought or hoped that the pandemic would have ended by now. Tragically, that is not the case. Now and then, I think that this project is done, only for a guidance to change, or for case numbers to spike, and then these signs shift in messaging. The passage of time also makes these signs interesting because, particularly evident in the ones left in place since the pandemic’s onset, they age.

2021-09-16 Origins and Project Description - 7.jpeg

Like us, these bits of paper or plastic did not expect to be in pandemic-world for this long.

In terms of organizational method, I am grouping these photos by the specific language they use or a theme that I’ve seen in them. Unfortunately, full-time graduate school work does not leave me the time to caption these with location, time, and date. What this means is that a given post may include photos from both early and late in the pandemic grouped together, without a clear visual indicator for when the photo was taken (though, if you dig, it’s possible that that metadata still shows up if you download the photo).

So given all that, I encourage you to read this not as a linear, historical record of pandemic signage, but as clusters of related images.

2021-09-16 Origins and Project Description - 6.jpeg

Finally, these are signs that I came across in my own day to day experiences. This means that they are far from comprehensive in terms of capturing anything close to the pandemic’s signage as a whole. This also means that they are coming from someone existing in some very particular places (mostly central Pennsylvania, but also, among others, the Philadelphia suburbs, Baltimore, northeast Pennsylvania, and Ogunquit, Maine), and from someone of the privileged upper-middle class, with the financial wherewithal to own the phones or standalone cameras used to take the photos, the leisure time to write these blog posts and share the photos, and the habits of day-to-day life and travel that include patronizing the retail establishments and restaurants that are the venue for a majority of these images.

In that sense, this is a sort of unintentional journal of me and my own activities as well. That’s I guess fitting, because I am quite literally reflected in many of these images. I tried dodging my way out of the reflections on doors and windows, but soon decided to just go with it.

  1. It’s not the most clever title, but I’ve thought of it this way for months now, and barring any very compelling reasons, I guess that’s just what I’ll call it   ↩

  2. The latter is one of the core characteristics of technical communication, as described in the course’s textbook, Technical Communication, by Mike Markel and Stuart Selber.  ↩