Everyone wants to get the biggest bang for their Yard Sign buck as possible. This does not mean squeezing as much working as possible on your sign! The key question to ask is, “What is legible”? By definition, legible is “capable of being read or distinguished”. For this lesson, we’ll focus on “is your sign capable of being read”?

First think is contrast which is “the relative difference between light and dark areas”. This is why all books are written with black ink on white paper. Black vs. white offers the largest amount of contrast, thereby increasing legibility.

Second is spacing. As I write I can see that this font provides a good amount of spacing between the letters.

Last is more of a guideline than a rule; DON’T STRETCH IT! Nobody likes stretch marks, so why do it to your sign if you don’t have to? Stretching is like using Silly Putty on your text. Remember Silly Putty? Put in on a news paper and stretch it up and down and left and right- pretty soon you can’t read a thing. The same is true for your sign. Remember some recent slogans for Nike? End of every commercial a black screen would appear with white lettering, ‘just do it’. They didn’t say, “Hey, we’ve got the entire screen, let’s make it as big as we can!” Granted, people are sitting 10 feet away motionless and not driving by at 60 mph.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Sign How-Tos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Everyone wants to get the biggest bang for their Yard Sign buck as possible. This does not mean squeezing as much working as possible on your sign! The key question to ask is, “What is legible”? By definition, legible is “capable of being read or distinguished”. For this lesson, we’ll focus on “is your sign capable of being read”?

First think is contrast which is “the relative difference between light and dark areas”. This is why all books are written with black ink on white paper. Black vs. white offers the largest amount of contrast, thereby increasing legibility.

Second is spacing. As I write I can see that this font provides a good amount of spacing between the letters.

Last is more of a guideline than a rule; DON’T STRETCH IT! Nobody likes stretch marks, so why do it to your sign if you don’t have to? Stretching is like using Silly Putty on your text. Remember Silly Putty? Put in on a news paper and stretch it up and down and left and right- pretty soon you can’t read a thing. The same is true for your sign. Remember some recent slogans for Nike? End of every commercial a black screen would appear with white lettering, ‘just do it’. They didn’t say, “Hey, we’ve got the entire screen, let’s make it as big as we can!” Granted, people are sitting 10 feet away motionless and not driving by at 60 mph.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Sign How-Tos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.