Designing signage for your business:

5 things to know

Signage is an important part of building awareness for your business. There are literally hundreds of tips and tricks that can change your signage from a logo outside your business to a marketing tool that promotes your business and drives new business to your doorstep.

At Signarama, we’ve made signage our business and grown into South Africa’s largest network of Signage experts across the country. We thought we’d share our Top 5 tips for designing signage for your business so that it delivers real return on investment.

• Understand your signs environment:

Understanding where your sign is going to be seen is an important part of guiding the design of the signage for maximum exposure. Ask yourself a few key questions, like ‘Where is the sign going to be located?’, ‘Does the sign need to be seen in the dark?’, ‘What other signs are around?’

You want to choose the right type of signage for the environment. It may be that you need an Illuminated sign if your sign needs to be seen at night or is cluttered by many other signs.

Understand the influencing factors and then research the various signage options available to find the one that is going to perform best in that environment.

• Create some contrast:

One of the main pieces of design advice to making signage work for your business, is to think about ways to make an impact with the sign.

Create contrast by using striking colours for various aspects of your signage, from the background to certain letters or words in your message. Changing colours or character size can help certain key concepts stick out and become eye-catching (think about the words ‘Sale’, ‘Discount’, ‘Quality’…)

Also tie this into the factors affecting your sign from the environment and how you can use contrast to make your signs stand out more.

• Don’t underestimate Simplicity:

Many signs have a limited amount of time in front of potential customer’s eyes. They have to convey their message and ‘sell’ within a few seconds to be effective.

Make your message as simple as possible. This doesn’t mean your sign can’t leave an impression OR still be thought provoking AFTER potential customers have seen the sign but does mean that the message should be simple enough to read and consume in a short amount of time.

Always simplify and shorten and keep your signage design Simple.

• Remember the FONT:

FONT is a useful element in creating contrast in your signage design, but the FONT used throughout is important for readability and impact.

Choosing the wrong FONT can result in passers-by straining to read your message, battling to understand the sell-point and completely ruin your signs chance of attracting business to your front door.

Don’t use Cursive or FONT that is too small to be read from a reasonable distance or passing speed. Stay away from lesser known FONTS and use BOLD and ITALICS to accentuate important words and key terms.

• Composition and Space:

There is an entire science dedicated to the use of composition and space in design to achieve a specific result. Composition and negative space is used to draw a person’s eye’s to a specific area (or make sure they don’t focus on a specific area).

Consider using design elements like composition and negative space to create a sign that directs the eye to your store, or away from other competitors.

There are many more elements that can make your business signage a success, so make your signage part of your business marketing plan (and not just a logo outside your business) by speaking with your nearest Signarama signage expert about the design of your next business sign.