A recent survey has discovered that 76% of people, in a pool of American consumers, had entered a store they’ve never been in before purely based on their external signage.
68% of these people actually made a purchase as a direct result of signage that caught their attention.
The value of your advertising signs is critical to both how your brand and business are perceived, as well as the success of your marketing efforts and promotions.
Having a solid design for these advertising signs is key and we’ve got 5 design tips that you absolutely need, keep reading!
1. Use Color And Contrast
Picture this, an advertising sign positioned right next to a big tree. This sign has a leafy green background with light green lettering on it. Come summer, this advertising sign will be playing a wonderful game of, can you see me?
The use of color and contrast on your advertising signs is key to helping you design something that catches the eye of your intended audience.
First, the color you use needs to be in line, to a large degree, with your overall branding and brand guidelines. If your company uses a specific color, you should try to stick to that as much as possible in all your advertising sign endevours.
Second, contrast if your new best friend. What looks good digitally and in smaller print doesn’t always translate well to large advertising signs. You don’t want your text to be too close in color to your background color or image, this means that you’ll want to use contrast to create text that is super readable from a fair distance away.
2. Simplicity Is Beautiful
You may feel that large format digital printing is the perfect opportunity for you to cram as much information as humanly possible into every square inch of your new sign. No!
Don’t do it!
When it comes to signage, less is more, always.
Don’t try to put every single one of your platforms from Twitter to your website to your helpline to your information email address to your Facebook page all one sign along with an image and a list of your products. Everything will be lost in the chaos.
Focus on something simple, keep your message clear and concise. Do this by deciding what your absolute minimum requirements are for your signage, start by including those, and then work your design around that.
3. Fantastic Fonts and When Not to Use Them
It can be really tempting to go in search of beautiful fonts that look stunning on-screen and then try to use these on your advertising signs.
Font selection for your advertising signs is super important.
The saying, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it!” couldn’t be more applicable than it is right now.
Your choice of font can take your sign from readable, understandable, and tangible to completely out-of-touch very quickly. Cursive, curly fonts on a large billboard are hardly ever easy to read.
Even if fancy, frilly fonts fit your brand identity, avoid using them on your advertising signs. The goal is to get people to read your message, understand it clearly, and come in and shop (or visit your premises).
Go for fonts that are super crisp, really clean, and have a powerful impact when put together with the rest of your design.
4. Design Hierarchy
Yes, the rank of levels on your advertising signs and banners outdoor means a whole lot.
So what is design hierarchy?
Basically, it’s the classing and layout of the information on your sign. Which information needs to stand out more? The largest text on your sign will be what grabs people’s attention first, so it makes sense that the largest text should be at the top of the sign.
Anything that comes before that will be lost to the person reading it.
Generally speaking, your promotional message is what will have the heaviest weight when it comes to your text, following from that would be other brand information like store location or the dates of the sale.
5. Find the Professionals
Signage is an art. As is the practice of design and copywriting and all the elements that go into creating a successful marketing or advertising campaign.
Ultimately, your advertising signs should be just a smaller cog in your marketing machine, and it’s really important that you find a partner who can offer services that create uniformity across all your brand touchpoints.
Agencies sometimes offer just signage, but you have other turnkey agencies that not only specialize in signage but also full-scope, direct-response advertising.
Ensure that you find the right supplier for what you want to achieve with your marketing campaign and your advertising efforts. These guys should be able to advise you when it comes to design, materials, location, and even installation. A professional signage company understands that signage is a big part of how people perceive your brand.
Advertising Signs Everywhere!
Think back to the last long drive that you took, or the last walk you went on through the busiest street in your neighborhood. Better year, think of the last time you took a stroll through your local mall.
How many advertising signs did you see?
Were there any specific ones that you can still remember?
Can you see how easy it is for brands to get lost in the sea of outdoor and store advertising?
Now if you really, really want to stand out, large format printing is how you do it, and guess what? Frontline Print has your large format printing needs covered, check it out!