Visual quality

King Abdullah Road in Riyadh is one of the most significant and extensive development projects in Saudi Arabia's capital. The road is one of the city's key east–west connecting roads and, as such, is very busy. It involves complex roadworks, divided into express traffic and slower-moving traffic with tunnels and turn-offs, plus new public transit with a Metro system and buses, and is also an important high-end shopping street.

Riyadh's urban planning authorities commissioned unit-design to devise a sophisticated set of rules for future projects intended to govern the visual quality of all means of commercial advertising and identification along the 25 km main thoroughfare. The manual that was drawn up served to motivate operators of businesses along the road to contribute to a high-quality visual identity. 

Following a detailed analysis, unit-design broke down into zones the road and its installations, and created a catalog of measures governing a wide variety of types and tasks of advertising identification. Illustrations and conditions were created for the catalog in order to set dimensions, materials, styles and lighting in proportion to the architecture and the streetscape. In addition, examples of applications were provided to make it easier to work with the identifications.