Are you looking for ways to attract more customers?
One of the best ways to catch the attention of paying customers is to get your message across at a glance. To do that, you need to learn how to design a sign that is eye-catching, memorable, and convincing.
The most important thing is that your business sign marks only the beginning of great customer experience. Reports show that 86% of consumers will pay more for great customer experience. Of course, you’ll need to follow through with your engaging and interesting signage.
We’ll focus on how to design a sign that will attract and engage paying customers for today. Keep reading to learn more.
1. Know Who and What the Sign Is For
Before you design a sign for your business, find out who you’re making it for. This knowledge will guide you throughout the designing process. Signs created for motorists won’t look the same as signs designed for kids in a mall.
Next, define your goals with the sign before you design it. Are you making it to inform people, advertise the business, or sell products? Is it a sign you’ll use for the long term or a one-time convention event?
Knowing the purpose of your sign will help you decide what and how much information to place on it. It will also help set the mood of your signage.
2. Create Clear and Precise Message
This is the second-most important step in the sign-creation process. Know the message you want to place on the signage. Do it before you focus on finding the right colors, fonts, or sizes.
A good thing to remember is that viewers have around 3 seconds to read your sign. You want them to get all the information they need within 3 seconds. The key is brevity, precision, and clarity.
Be concise yet informative. Pick out all the relevant information that your customers need to know in 3 seconds. Place all that in your sign (as text and/or images) and nothing more.
3. Focus on the Sign’s Readability
A good sign is always legible no matter where you stand to look at it from. Also, you don’t need to take a harder or closer look to understand what’s written on it. Make your sign readable; we can’t emphasize this enough.
This is very important when your sign is one that’s meant to lead your customers to you. After all, how can your customers find you when they can’t understand your sign? You can see many great examples of pylon signs that use big, bold, block letters.
Font plays a very big role in the readability of your sign. Remember, each font type also has a particular feel to it. For example, the font styles Tahoma and Times New Roman have a formal feel to them.
4. Design a Sign With Compelling Colors
Certain colors and color combinations play a significant role in marketing. Use color psychology to your advantage. Using contrasting colors is a great way to put the audience’s attention on particular keywords.
This technique also lends to better legibility. If you want to have colorful signage, use contrasting colors that fit each other well, and don’t look tacky. If you want to add a lot of colors, pick one as the main color to take up most of the sign.
It’s helpful to make various design choices with different color combinations beforehand. For example, your basic business sign design uses the colors red and white. Try to inverse the colors of the font and background and see how well it holds up.
Better yet, try to change the color combinations of the sign. Instead of red and white, make it red and yellow, blue and black, and more. Certain color combinations have high readability while others make text difficult to read.
5. Find the Right Size for Your Business Sign
Size matters even when you design signs for your business. A good sign doesn’t always mean it needs to be big. Certain signs work best when they’re in the appropriate sizes.
Again, you want great legibility for your signage. Roadside signs do their jobs best when you use large designs. You want potential customers to spot your business sign even when they’re still 50 feet away.
Something to guide you by is the rule of “10 feet per inch of letter height”. That means lettering with 8 inches of height has the best impact at 80 feet distance.
6. Use High-Resolution Images
Don’t use low-resolution images or graphics. They’ll end up looking blurry once the sign gets printed out. Use high-resolution images instead, which is a facet of high-quality signs.
If you want to add photos on the sign, take the photos with a quality camera. You can also use stock images, which often come in high quality and various resolutions. If you want to add your business logo on the sign, make sure it has a high resolution.
If your business logo isn’t in high-resolution, get it re-done as a vector file or in PNG format. The PNG format uses LZW compression or lossless compression. That means the image quality remains the same no matter how small or big you stretch the image.
Don’t be afraid to use animated graphics for digital signs. Digital signage can help boost average sales by almost 30%. Make sure that you still use high-quality images and graphics for digital signage.
7. Consider the Placement of Your Sign
Finally, you have to look at the area where you’ll put the sign, too. You don’t want to place your well-designed sign in a corner where nobody will see it. You want to place it in a spot where your potential customers will spot it.
Are you going to place the sign right in front of the establishment? Will you hang it at the front window space? Is it a banner-type sign that you’ll hang at the awning?
Start thinking about where you want to place the sign before you get it done. Planning this can give you a lot of great ideas about how you’ll design it. Get creative with the location of the sign and how you design it.
For example, if you’ll stick your sign on the front window, you can use a window film instead. Make the text on your sign stand out from the frosted part. This works best for signs with brief messages or your business name.
Design the Sign That’s Right for Your Business
Now you know how to design a sign for business. Don’t hesitate to use these signage tips to your advantage and start getting people’s attention!
But why stop here when you can discover more about designing a sign? If you want to learn more about grabbing your customers’ attention with signage, check out our other guides right here, today! We might have the business guide you need to find success.
