There are definitely a few hard-and-fast rules when it comes to designing car signs Santa Rosa. One would be that you want a contrast between your lettering and the background so that the casual viewer can quickly figure out the message.
Another would be that the further away your sign is from the viewer, the less flowery script should be used (go with sans serif over serif…more on that below).
Car Signs Santa Rosa
What’s also interesting is that there’s more creativity involved than you might at first have suspected. In one survey, 500 small businesses were polled throughout the United States, and it turns out that there might be an age difference in sign design preferences.
Younger smaller business owners (folks within that 18-34 year old demographic that politicians seem so concerned about) preferred signs that emphasized creative graphics and more colorful signage. Older small business owners (a.k.a., baby boomers) went for simplistic designs that got in and out.
The takeaway? There’s definitely more than one way to skin a cat, but if you’re designing car signs Santa Rosa then you might attract more millennial attention with attention-grabbing signage. Still, there are a few basics – those hard-and-fast rules alluded to above – that will benefit anyone.
Rules Businesses Everywhere Benefit From
Signs are about creativity…so what’s with all this talk about rules? Well, while creativity is something that will get your car signs Santa Rosa noticed, there are a few constants of human perception – e..g, people can read your signs best when there’s a high contrast (better readability) between foreground and background.
Continuous Background
Actual retention of the content of your business signs goes up with customers if there’s a continuous background color and you put your text and graphics in the foreground for easy contrast. In other words, people will actually remember what your car signs Santa Rosa said more often than not as long as the background of your signs isn’t too busy and distracting.
High Contrast
Aside from sticking with one design and color for a continuous background, you’ll probably also want to choose colors that contrast highly. A blue and purple, by contrast, wouldn’t be the best choice for contrast because those colors are fairly similar. Go with colors that contrast boldly.
If you need more help differentiating background and foreground, add a border – borders around your text have been shown to increase retention.
Sans Serif Fonts
Speaking of retention, two other factors will also increase the viewer’s ability to retain the message on your car signs Santa Rosa – the font type and the font size. Let’s start with the font type.
There’s a big distinction in the font world – believe it or not people argue endlessly about this stuff! – between serif font and sans serif. What’s the difference?
Serif fonts are fonts that have extending features shooting out from the end of the letters and typically look “fancier.” Fancier isn’t necessarily what you want with signs.
You want higher retention from the interested and casual viewer alike; you want people to see your sign and either call you up, go online, or check out your wares in person, right? To do that you need legibility. For legibility and higher retention go with a sans serif font (sans is a Latin word that simply means “without”).
Size Does Actually Matter
Now, ahem, does size matter? Yes, but perhaps not in the way that most people think. The sign experts say that you should go with an extra inch of height for your font for every ten feet of viewing distance.
So, you might think about having the font three inches taller in height if your sign is going to be viewed most often from thirty feet further away.
One last general rule of thumb – the further away your car signs Santa Rosa are viewed from, the more legible your script needs to be! Think sans serif against a continuous, contrasted background. Above all, think about your intended audience. Contact us for more information.