Features of the Collaborative Design of Text and Icons in Signage for Child-Friendly Spaces

Abstract

This paper takes the collaborative relationship between text and icons in signage for child-friendly spaces as its research object, focusing on sign design in children’s hospitals, children’s libraries, children’s museums, and related public service and play environments. Unlike existing studies, which have largely approached the issue from a single perspective such as children’s cognition, environmental wayfinding, text readability, or icon recognizability, this study regards text and icons as interactive elements within the same unit of information. From the perspective of their collaborative relationship, it examines their combined role in spatial recognition, information comprehension, and experiential guidance in children’s spaces. The study adopts a combination of case analysis, comparative analysis, and visual induction, and constructs an analytical framework consisting of the formal dimension, semantic dimension, and guidance dimension. On this basis, a comparative study was conducted on nine representative cases of signage in child-friendly spaces. The findings show that the interaction between text and icons in such signage can be mainly summarized into three types: confirmation-oriented, semantic-cohesive, and experience-participatory. These correspond respectively to three core needs: rapid recognition, stable understanding, and active approach. Overall, effective collaboration is not primarily manifested in the synchronized formal transformation of text and icons at the level of visual styling, but rather in a configurational form of collaboration. In this relationship, text provides a stable framework for reading and hierarchical order, while icons assume the functions of differentiated identification, semantic cueing, and situational participation. This study provides an analytical and practiceoriented research framework for the design of signage in child-friendly public spaces, and also offers a reference for optimizing text organization, icon configuration, and text–image relationships in contemporary children’s spaces