Signs of the Everyday, Every Day explores the stories offered by ubiquitous signs in a city. These signs are unnoticed, everyday objects which inform and shape urban narratives. The 16-page essay brings together photographic and textual observations from 2015-2021, which offer spaces for imagining what is not known about places and objects in the city. This work forms part of an ongoing research project which asks: ‘in what ways might we explore a city in terms of everyday encounters, and of visible and imaginary traces?’

Drawing from the explorations of ‘unnoticed’ signs discussed by Mars and Kohlstead (2020) and de Certeau’s process of giving ‘shape to spaces’ (1984), Triggs offers a unique perspective on the graphic language of the everyday through the materiality of graphic communication. The essay brings together a small, edited, sampling from eight years of photographic images originally posted to the Triggs’s Instagram site which set out to record and evidence the ‘trace’ of her daily walks. Formal and informal signs of the city are accompanied by extended captions comprising object-orientated stories alongside a reflective discussion. As a photographer and design historian, Triggs argues for an emerging practice rooted in place-based digital memory, archives, and communication.

This essay contributes to a collection of writings and interviews published in 2022 titled Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design. The book is edited by James Dyer and Nick Deakin; with a Foreword by Alex Coles, and contributions from James Williams, Patrick Thomas, Fraser Muggeridge, DR.ME, Textbook Studio, and Johanna Drucker.

Editors: James Dyer and Nick Deakin, Graphic design: Totally Okay, Text editor: James Dyer, Advisor: Professor Anne Massey, Printer: Kopa, Fonts: Messina Sans, Cooper Black.