Signage 101 : Design Tips and Best Practices

Signage 101 : Design Tips and Best Practices

The growth and success of your company depend on how well your marketing is planned and created. Being able to attract customers will drive income, and you can do this by making sure that you put up the right signage.

At first, you may think that signages are simple posters, but they are more than that. You can look at them as salespeople, minus the sales talk.

Signage Design Best Practices

When you hire employees, you set a certain standard that they must meet. For example, if you own an apparel shop, your salespeople are expected to be well-dressed and presentable. You expect them to observe proper hygiene and grooming. Aside from the physical aspects, they also need to be knowledgeable about what you are selling.

For outdoor neon signage then you need to work with an expert partner who can refine and articulate your unique selling proposition in a small space.

Therefore, in an advertising scenario, your silent sales agent, which is your signage, needs to be attractive and able to convey your message. To do this, consider the following tips in signage designing:

Be specific

Narrowcasting is a process by which you work around a set target. It is the opposite of broadcasting, which is most commonly used in news companies. In the latter, all information is broadcast without targeting a specific group of consumers. Because of technology, signages can now be customized based on demographics and other factors.

Keep it simple

This is a crucial element that you need to know when doing a signage layout. You need to be straightforward. Keep it too simple, and your customer becomes clueless about your business, making the advertising virtually ineffective. On the other hand, make it too wordy, and your customer becomes too overwhelmed with the information, making it ineffective as well.

Apply the five-second rule—the message must be conveyed in less than five seconds. If you need more than that, either shorten the text or make use of various symbols. While this could be considered a rule of thumb, you can also work around actual statistics. In 2019, people were observed to look at an average of 1.5 seconds on a mobile phone, 1.7 seconds on a poster, 2.1 seconds on a print ad, and 9 seconds on a pre-roll ad on a desktop.

Pay attention to the font

Font styles, font sizes, and font color are all equally essential. Keep in mind that advertisements are only noticed within seconds, so you have to make the most out of it. Using a headline font is a popular choice. Consider print journalism styles and decide whether you could take out weasel words.

Create a brief but concise summary, and finally, a call to action. Most advertisers tend to miss the last part, which stands to complete an effective signage design. Adding a call to action will invite the customer to do something about your ad; it tells the customer that the signage is not just there for information reasons, but for the customer’s involvement, too.

In signage design, you have to keep one thing in mind: face value sells. No matter how informative your sign is, if you could not catch the customer’s attention, they will not take action. You want an effective sign that involves not just one of the items above, but all of them. It needs to be specific, simple, informative and inviting altogether.

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