Living in a cosmopolitan city like New York, you tend to take a boastful pride in being able to distinguish different languages, even if you can't understand what's being said. When tourists from the heartland can't tell the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin, Jamaican patois and Haitian French, or even Urdu and Arabic, you might let out a snooty snicker while reading your Economist down at the diner.

But go to one of the big international airports, Mr. Cosmopolitan, and it's full-on Tower of Babel. Was that...Yiddish? Finnish? My seatmate says he's from Latvia, what do they speak there again? Yet all of these people have the same needs--gotta find the bathroom, the gate, and someplace to buy five-Euro bottles of water. Meaning airport signage has gotta be spot-on and informative in a way that signs leading to the Holland Tunnel do not have to be.

Do they get it right? Check out Dutch signage specialist Sander Baumann's kick-ass roundup and analysis of international airport signage, from Ataturk to Zurich, and tell us what you think.

via design work plan