January 25, 2002
Campaign offers signs of the times
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| Mike Lemaire, left, and John Benefeito painstakingly line up and apply vinyl to a wooden frame Tuesday morning as they work on one in a series of new signs planned for campus. Later that morning they erected the Vet Med 3A billboard just northwest of the Vet Med Teaching Hospital. Debbie Aldridge/Mediaworks |
The projects themselves may be years away from completion, but reminders of the physical growth associated with Tidal Wave II are already cropping up across campus as part of a new signage campaign.
The mini-billboards are designed to keep students, employees and area residents up-to-date on dozens of projects under way to ease the pressures of enrollment growth, said John Meyer, vice chancellor for resource management and planning.
"We want to announce to the campus community that help is on the way," he said.
Facilities sign specialist Matt Kovanda hopes to have the campaign’s about 30 billboards in place by the first week in March.
Among other projects, the signs will herald health and mathematical science instructional facilities, new labs like the genome launch facility, Segundo housing and Unitrans expansions, additions to the Physics/Geology Building and Hunt Hall renovations.
This sign campaign is somewhat different from similar endeavors, Meyer said. "Signage usually is erected when construction of projects begins, but this effort provides information about facilities well in advance of construction. We want to assure the campus community that someone else is worrying about this stuff so they don’t have to."
Each sign takes about 14 hours to fabricate and install, and about one-third of the signs have been erected. Most will measure 5 feet by 10 feet.
The informational signs mark the first phase of the campaign.
"After these, we will be installing some unique signs with messages that express our gratitude to people for putting up with the inconvenience," said Meyer, noting: "We hope to sprinkle a little humor in between the bulldozers."
Other campuses have had success with this type of approach, he said. For instance, New York’s Vassar College poked fun at the mess created by an onslaught of construction with billboards proclaiming: "Rome wasn’t built in a day. (If it had been, we would have used their contractor.)," "Don’t try this at home," "Hey, construction happens," and "Gone today, here tomorrow."
Dateline UC Davis is the faculty and staff newspaper for the University of California, Davis.