Yet, in 1991, there was no source for safety symbol art which complied with the then new Standard’s design, comprehension testing criteria and image content. As a former chairperson of the Z535.3 symbol subcommittee, Olgyay took it upon herself to develop a product which would meet the fore-mentioned public communication need. Bolstered by an NEA grant, the solution was her book; a commercially available book published in 1995 by Van Nostrand Reinhold.

To maximize accessibility to the camera-ready symbol art, the book provided both digital art on a floppy disk and scanable line art. It was VNR’s first book to include digital art. The symbol art was provided in a variety of configurations (for a total of ninety-six versions) in order to accommodate a range of application requirements for varying surround shapes, color breaks and orientation. In addition, to further facilitate reproduction of the symbol, the book’s landscape format was designed to facilitate flat bed scanning without compromising its spine.

Design of the book’s contents maximizes its accessibility to the symbol art.
A visual and message index is complemented by a miniature symbol on the pages’ flip corner to facilitate locating art for each of the forty safety messages.
In addition, every book spread summarizes each page’s content in its interior columns, allowing the reader to skim the histories of symbol systems, standardization and harmonization efforts.
 
 

The year after its 1995 printing, the book received Print magazine’s Design Excellence Award and was included in it’s Digital Art & Design Annual 4 and was referenced in The WomanSource Catalog & Review.

The following year, Safety Symbols Art was included as one of twenty “significant contemporary ergonomic design products” in conjunction with the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum’s Henry Dreyfuss exhibit. As a result, the symbols were featured in a segment of ABC’s May 27, 1997 broadcast of World News with Peter Jennings. In 1997, it also was positively reviewed in Communication News and ID News.

The Industrial Designers of America’s magazine, Innovation, included the symbol art in a 1998 article on hazard warnings.

The symbol set first appeared as the IIID safety symbols in the 2001 Information Design Journal article “Development & testing of the IIID safety symbols system” and then again in the 2003 Proceedings of the XVth Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association held in Seoul, Korea which included a paper, “Building on Test Results to Design Safety Symbols”, in its Emergency & Warning’s workshops.

All Z535.3 Standard revisions since 1998 have referenced Olgyay’s book as a symbol source and the testing protocol materials were reproduced in the body of the document as exemplary.
 
 

Special thanks also go to
Stefan Egger, IIID’s IN-SAFETY project manager, who - before having arranged for the presentation of the IIID Safety Symbol System on the IIID website - prepared Nora’s artwork for conversion into a font
and to
Viktor Solt-Bittner, creator of fonts like ITC Johann Sparkling™ and FF Danubia™, for realizing the IIIDSafetySymbols.ttf.