Sign How-Tos

Sign Design Basics: Logo Designs

I bet you can easily recognize all of these companies. That’s the hallmark of a good logo.

 

We’ve all seen them – they are everywhere we look. Whether in a book, on TV, on the street, or in a shop. Famous people stand behind them, children drive their parents bananas because of them, and people use them to decide if a purchase is worthwhile or not. Have you guessed what they are yet? No? Really? Alright then, in the spirit of fair play I’ll tell you… BRAND NAMES! I know you already knew that… you were just testing me 🙂

Every brand name in the universe (yes, I am almost positive that aliens are aware of them too) has one unique thing in common no matter how different that brand may be. This element is very important but sometimes overlooked by customers who contact us to buy signs. In case you aren’t already ahead of me again, I’m talking about logos.

A logo is the graphic element of a trademark or brand, which is set in a special typeface/font, or arranged in a particular, but a legible way. The shape, color, typeface, etc. should be distinctly different from others in a similar market.  The logo of a business should be a symbol or have a special meaning that defines a business. For example, if your business is in the computer industry such as a web designer, graphic artist, web developer, or data entry clerk, that symbol might be a computer, keyboard or mouse. When picking a logo for your business make sure the logo has a theme that matches your business and it is different from other business logos. You are looking for a unique image that will identify your business.

You would be surprised by how many people don’t even have a logo of some sort. And these things are imperative to branding your company. I want you to know, I understand. Logo creation can be a very large expense if you go to the experts (recommended), but you don’t have to spend so much. I believe in your creative potential and the power of your imagination. It IS your company, YOUR service, and you alone know exactly what the logo should represent. To get you started on that creative path, I have gathered a few resources for you:

https://www.logomaker.com/ – free logo designer (online)

https://www.designevo.com/– free logo designer (online)

https://cooltext.com/ – free text designer (online)

https://www.allgraphicdesign.com/logo.html  – tips and tools

There are a few things you should keep in mind when designing your logo:

1. A logo doesn’t need to say what a company does – it just IS
The Mercedes logo isn’t a car. The Virgin Atlantic logo isn’t an airplane. The Apple logo isn’t a computer. Etc.

2. Not every logo needs a mark
Sometimes all you need is a professional logotype (text) instead of an image to identify your business.

3. Picasso had to start somewhere
You don’t have to be an artist to sketch out some basic ideas to get you started.

4. Leave trends to the fashion industry
Trends come and go, and when you’re talking about changing a pair of jeans, or buying a new dress, that’s fine, but where your brand identity is concerned, longevity is key; don’t follow the pack. Stand out.

5. Work in black first
By leaving color to the end of the process, you focus on the idea.

6. Keep it appropriate


Designing for a law firm? Ditch the fun approach. Designing for a kid’s TV show? Nothing too serious. I could go on, but you get the idea.

7. Simplicity aids recognition


Keeping the design simple allows for flexibility in size. Ideally, your design should work at a minimum of around one inch without loss of detail. Look at the logos of large corporations like Mitsubishi, Samsung, FedEx, BBC, and the ever popular McDonalds. Their logos look simple and are easier to recognize because of it.

8. One thing to remember


That’s it. Leave your clients with just one thing to remember about the design. All strong logos have one single feature to help them stand out. Not two, not three, not four.

One.

Good luck with your logo design! We look forward to seeing it in the future J

Magnetic Signs: Rules of Attraction

I know you have heard the phrase “opposites attract”. I’m going to have to say that’s pretty true for the most part! But the laws of attraction are varied and can seem a little overwhelming. There are so many “do’s” and “don’ts”, body language, expressions… well, you get the idea. So much to remember as if attraction wasn’t complicated enough already! How wonderful to know that there is one attracting option that doesn’t have all these rules!

You want customers – you have to attract them. The methods are still varied, but there is one that continues to stick around. Magnetic signs! See, and you thought this was going to be a totally off topic “rules of attraction” piece :).

You can use a combination of advertising methods (highly recommended) but once the signs are placed, the flyers are out, and your banners are fluttering in the wind, what options do you have for ads that get seen everywhere? Magnetic signs, of course! There are virtually no limitations on the design of a custom magnetic vehicle sign and they offer you the ease of a one minute removal.

Magnetic signs work great for:
Commercial Fleets
Official Vehicles
Service Fleets
Novelty Magnets
Realtor Vehicles
Delivery Vehicles

Magnetic signs are made of a magnetic material backing with high quality vinyl adhered to the front side of the magnet. Depending on the design, the vinyl adhered can be a full sheet of digitally printed vinyl or die cut vinyl decals placed on the magnet.

Common placement of magnetic signs include the left front door, right front door, or back of the vehicle. As a warning, magnetic signs should never be placed on fresh paint. Allow at least 60 days for paint to cure. When installing magnetic signs, ensure that both the vehicle surface and the magnet surface is clean. If even a small amount of dirt is left on the surface it increases the chances of the magnetic signs falling off and the chance that the vehicle paint job will be damaged.

Cleaning magnetic signs is very easy. You can use any household cleaner and a soft cloth. Wet the soft cloth or sponge and wipe down the sign. Always remove magnetic signs before taking your vehicle through any car wash. Also remember to periodically remove the sign and wash and wax underneath the magnet.

Car Magnets

Removing a magnetic sign is simple, Start at one side of the sign, lift off and slowly roll back. Magnetic signs should always be stored adhered to a steel surface or laid flat. Never roll up magnetic signs for long period of time, as they will retain the rolled shape after awhile and will not stay flat on the surface of your vehicle. Also do not store your magnetic signs back to back as they will lose their magnetism. Store them on a flat metal surface like the side of your fridge or a steel door.

Now you know! Magnetic signs are easy to install, great to use, and attractive!

Tips for Effective Campaign Signs

Whether you’re running for mayor or class president a good campaign sign is always going to be a vital piece of your marketing strategy.

The first thing you need to remember when designing campaign signs is that most onlookers will fly by your sign and have only seconds to take it in, so keeping things simple is important. Using basic colors such as blue, red, black, or green is effective in capturing the attention of individuals passing by without overwhelming them. Think about how well the ‘Vote for Pedro’ signs worked; it doesn’t take glitter and ribbons to capture a voter’s attention.  Using standard colors like red and blue can also help clear up what side of the political spectrum you represent such as red for republican and blue for democrat.

Besides a good design the quality of your sign is also important to consider.  Good quality campaign signs are often made of corrugated plastic with a vinyl over lay for the design.  It’s spring time and you know that means frequent rain showers.   Corrugated plastic is able to withstand any punch Mother Nature can swing.

Another aspect to consider is the placement of your campaign signs. Running for any office means you want to be known and seen.  While you’re out shaking hands and kissing babies, your campaign signs should be doing their part too.  It’s wise to map out your voting area so you can strategically place your signs along possible voter’s routes.

Campaigning can be stressful but effectively marketing yourself with campaign signs can make all the difference, Super Cheap Signs knows campaign signs, so reach out for more information.

State Regulations for Signage

Please ensure that you follow local and state guidelines for signage! I have listed each state below. Clicking these links will take you to a page that breaks out the states by city. By clicking on your chosen city, you will be presented with that cities codes. Locate the sign ordinance and ensure that you are within the regulations.

Only post signs within the legal guidelines!Step 1 – Understand the importance of sign ordinances to community beautification efforts. Local conservation groups and community-improvement organizations try to limit the size of signs, preventing them from becoming a distractive nuisance.

Step 2 – Speak with your city council about regulations restricting the use of signs attached to your buildings. Each community has ordinances that regulate the size, placement and content of signs that may be unique from other communities. In order to obey local laws, you should approach the city council with any unusual signage requests.

Step 3 – Consult with your state’s highway department about billboards and logos placed on highway exit signs. While private property owners can place any advertisement they want on a billboard, most highway departments help regulate the size of billboards to avoid distractions to drivers. Highway department officials can also help you re-size your logo to meet exit-sign standards and promote your business effectively.

Step 4 – Make sure you obey signage ordinances that regulate the placement of private business or campaign signs adjacent to public signs. Your signs cannot block those indicating street names, speed limits and traffic warnings because of public safety concerns.

Step 5 – Avoid violation of city laws that govern the color and design of business signs. While some communities allow business owners freedom to choose their design aesthetics, most cities prohibit bright colors or flashing lights to avoid traffic issues. Likewise, city councils will often prevent business owners from creating signage that is lewd or inappropriate for children.

Step 6 – Learn about the National Scenic Byways Program. Featured on Byways.org, it is devoted to protecting highways and waterways from over development, including excessive signage.

State Ordinances:

Texas
Washington
Oregon
California
Idaho
Nevada

Arizona
Utah
Wyoming
Montana
Colorado
New Mexico
Oklahoma
Kansas
Nebraska
S Dakota
N Dakota
Minnesota
Iowa
Missouri
Arkansas
Louisiana
Wisconsin
Illinois
Tennessee
Mississippi
Indiana
Alabama
Kentucky
Michigan
Ohio
West Virginia
Virginia
N Carolina
S Carolina
Georgia
Florida
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Delaware
New Jersey
Connecticut
New York
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
Vermont
New Hampshire
Maine
Hawaii
Alaska

If you have information pertaining to any of these ordinances (changes that are not listed, etc.), please email me!

10 Marketing Tips: Yard Signs & Banners

Table of Contents

The importance of marketing with yard signs and banners

Stationary outdoor advertising normally includes the use of billboards, bus benches, yard signs, and banners.  On the other hand, mobile outdoor advertising includes the use of ad signs placed on buses, taxis, or even your own vehicle (i.e. car magnets or magnetic signs).  For the purposes of this post, we have chosen to focus on certain aspects of using cheap yard signs and banners based on their cost-effectiveness.  It is well known that yard signs and banners are not only the most economical venues, but they are also quite functional and practical.

Using yard signs and banners to promote your business

The following is a list of ten marketing tips for using cheap yard signs and banners to promote and increase your business:

1.    Always use a legible text that is clear, concise, and simple to read
2.    The larger more legible fonts work best – examples include Arial, Sans Serif, or Verdana
3.    Stick to a single idea or message when designing your cheap yard signs and banners – if the idea or message is too complex, it will not have a positive impact on those commuters who are trying to read it as they pass the yard sign or banner
4.    Make it short and sweet – in other words, keep the message brief but get your point across and include an image, a company or product logo, or both.
5.    Bold, bright colors work best – to an extent that is.  Granted, we realize that you do want your cheap yard signs and banners to attract attention.  However, if they are overly garish in appearance, the commuter won’t even try to read them
6.    Choose the image you plan to use very carefully – this is especially true if you are placing an image of your face on the yard sign or banner.  We recommend using no more than three visual elements and staying away from complex scenes or landscapes.
7.    Identify what or who the advertising pertains to – your name and location are paramount because your idea or message means nothing to the consumer if they don’t know who you are and where to find you.
8.    Keep the background of your cheap yard signs and banners as simple as possible – white backgrounds always work best as other colors used will stand out more effectively and attract more attention.
9.    Don’t overdo the amount of white background that you use – granted, you do want images and messages bordered by the white background.  However, if there is too much white, the yard sign or banner won’t be as appealing to the commuter passing them.
10.    Test your cheap yard signs or banners – have a family member or friend pass by your yard sign or banner and get their reaction.  Remember, that the commuter only has about 5-6 seconds when passing by to read your message, so use that as a criterion when testing their effectiveness.

Ready to get the signage your business deserves without breaking the bank? Visit our Super Cheap Signs today and discover the perfect solution at an unbeatable price. Click here to start saving!

Yard Sign Placement Strategies

Yard Signs and their many uses

Yard signs are one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising. Whether you are promoting your home-based business or some type of event, yard signs are a great way to get the word out. Yard signs are used for a variety of reasons besides advertising a business or products, such as:

o Selling a vehicle
o Houses for sale
o Property rentals
o Political campaigning
o Network Marketing entities
o Loan and mortgage companies
o Landscapers and lawn maintenance
o Churches
o Builders and contractors

Because yard signs are such an effective form of advertising, all types of businesses and organizations can benefit from using them. When you take the cost of yard signs into consideration, you’re looking at one of the most affordable forms of advertising that a business or organization can use.

Things to consider when placing your signs

It is always recommended yard signs be colorful so they attract the attention of the people driving by. However, the key aspect here is: if you have a nice looking piece of property, you do not want the yard signs to detract from the looks of the property. Make sure that you signs have pleasing and easy to read color combinations and deigns. A nice sign is all well and good, but without a placement strategy, it may not be as effective. Here are a few tips to consider where the placement of your yard signs is concerned.

The placement of your signs is typically determined by the location of your property. In other words, if your house or place of business is located in the middle of the block, you’ll obviously want to place your signs at both ends of your property. If your lot is longer, you might want to consider placing an additional sign in the middle of your property as well as the ones on each end. We also suggest that the signs at the ends of your property are angled slightly so that they face the oncoming traffic as well as the street.

Additional strategies include the following:

  • Signs should be placed in an upright position so that they are at a 90° angle to the ground and should not lean either backward or forward.
  • The signs should be sitting between 6 inches and a foot above the ground once you have them staked in.
  • Place the signs as close to the road as what city regulations will allow – it’s a good idea to check with your local authorities about the rules and regulations involved.
  • Another strategy involves the clumping of business or campaign signs in groups of from three to five yard signs using the same message on each, or a message that reads as a sentence from sign to sign.
  • Timing should also be a part of your sign placement strategy – in other words, if you’re planning a special time-sensitive sale, put your signs out the night before the sale begins and be sure to remove them the evening that your sale ends.

Five Ways To Entice Clients Using Yard Signs

For all practical purposes, there is no more affordable and effective form of outdoor advertising than yard signs. Dollar for dollar, they are the most cost-effective way to drive foot traffic to your business or organization and generate sales. The key to having effective yard signs involves using creativity in the design of them. Be careful that you don’t overdo it though because you could detract from the impact that the sign will have on passersby. Additionally, an overly flashy sign can also be garish and detract from the looks of your business or home property.

Creativity leads to greater effectiveness when designing your yard signs. The following are five creative ways to bring in customers using yard signs:

You obviously want to put your name, address, and phone number on your yard sign. However, the creativity you use in the way you display those can make a difference in the amount of foot traffic that sign does or doesn’t generate. We recommend that you use large block 3-D lettering for the name of your business so it looks like your name is jumping off the face of the sign.

Add directional information that stands out and attracts attention. If you place signs away from your business to direct them to it, using a map that shows your location or employing direction arrows make the sign more creative and effective at attracting customers to your business. Placing a map on the sign means that you will have to use a larger sized sign so that people can see your map.

Put your company logo on your yard sign. This is what we call a “no-brainer” and is a creative way to make your yard sign more effective and bring you more customers. Your logo is the recognizer for those potential customers as it serves to identify you. The more people see your logo, the more market awareness is created.

Images and photos are creative ways to entice more customers to your place of business. It’s a psychological fact that placing a face with the name of a business or a particular product on the yard sign breeds trust for you and your business. Additionally, the use of an image, such as a photo of a product you are promoting on sale is another creative way to get potential customers to pay attention to you.

Use multiple signs in groups of three to five to send out your message. Remember the old Burma Shave or Stuckey’s signs you used to see when you were driving down the highway? That was creative genius in the finest sense of the terms where the use of road/yard signs was concerned. It should also serve as a good idea on how to be more creative with your yard signs. Use groups of three to five signs to get your message across either by having them all be identical or by spelling out a call to action.

Printing: Back to Basics 2

If you’re creating artwork for printing, you’ll only get decent results if you’ve got a basic understanding of image resolution. Don’t worry, it’s actually quite a simple concept – nowhere near as complex as some people seem to think. So stick with me here, I’m going to try to make this as painless as possible…

Resolution:

Resolution is a concept that continues to baffle even graphic artists. In the context of editing photos, resolution is a measurement of the output quality of an image. The most common units to measure resolution include: PPI (pixels per inch), DPI (dots per inch), LPI (lines per inch), and SPI (samples per inch). For our purposes, we will focus on DPI and PPI because that is what you will be dealing with most often when printing photographs.

As you probably know, when you view a photograph on your computer monitor you’re actually looking at a grid of tiny dots or ‘pixels’. Similarly, when a photograph is reproduced in print, it is made up of thousands of small dots of ink. Resolution refers to the number of these dots (or pixels) which are squeezed into a given area. The smaller the dot, the more dots you can fit into a horizontal inch, and the sharper an image will appear to the human eye (up to a point).
If you zoom into a photograph on your PC monitor you will be able to see the grid of pixels which make up the image.

The resolution of an image is usually measured in dots per inch (dpi) or pixels per inch (ppi). Essentially dpi and ppi refer to the same thing, it’s simply the number of dots or pixels which make up an image. For more information on pixels see my earlier post Vector -VS- Bitmap: A basic breakdown.

If you view an image on your computer monitor its resolution will need to be at least 72dpi to appear sharp and clear. A lower resolution will result in large pixels which will be detected by your eye, resulting in a fuzzy or ‘pixelated’ image. However, if the same image were reproduced on paper using a commercial printing process it would need a resolution of around 300dpi to achieve a sharp result.

A printed image requires a much higher resolution than an on-screen image (4 times greater to be precise). Therefore, just because your image looks sharp and crisp when viewed on-screen, it doesn’t mean it will reproduce correctly when printed.

Stay tuned in! Next time we will explore how to improve the resolution of an image for printing!

How To Create A Great Outdoor Sign

Before you design your sign, be sure to consider the intended display area for your signs. Many graphic artists make the mistake of creating designs that look fabulous on their screen but not so fabulous for a large display sign. Whereas text conveys the message in an electric file, graphic design conveys the message in a large printed product such as banners and cortex Bandit signs. This is why it is so important to have minimal written content.

With all the competition available in today’s world, it’s important to best utilize the sign colors and space to produce the best possible advantage. The right text will give the most import information needed, such as contact information. But it is the colors, the layout and the design which will grab new customers.

To maximize the impact of your signs, be sure to take into consideration where you want to place your signs. The placement of your signs plays a big role in how many new customers you gain.

Here are some quick tips prior to placing your Super Cheap Signs order.

  1. View a couple of the areas or the location you will be placing your signs. Guess work can create a lot of wasted space. Outdoor signs are designed for pedestrians and motorists, the signs are expected to be more visible from farther distances than indoor signs. If most the new customers you want to attract will see them at night, you don’t want a black background with yellow letters.
  2. Vinyl banners are primarily used for its visual impact more than its word content. The visual display should be able say its message in seconds with a picture and minimal text. Use contrasting colors so the words and or pictures stand out. The colors you use in your banner should not match the color of the building or placement to which you will be using to hang the banner from.
  3. Consider who will be reading the sign and who you want to read the sign. If you own a coffee shop and the community is dog friendly, your banner can show a dog sitting at a table while its owner drinks coffee.

Fonts and Typefaces Could Make The Difference

Fonts and typefaces and sizes, oh my; I mean this is pretty boring stuff. Nobody really wants to hear about it or think about it, even me, and my livelihood depends on it. Letters are the single most important part of a sign or banner, they are the building blocks of your message.

It may be a boring topic, but I can tell you this: nothing can screw up a sign faster than typeface experiments. With that said, here are my helpful type-tips:

  • Boring fonts usually work best if you’re considering a type-face with a name like Lounge Bait or Mighty Tomato, please just stop what you’re doing and count to ten. Old stand-bys are called that for a reason, they are clean and readable use them.
  • Avoid too many words it’s tempting to put a lot of information on your sign.  Don’t do it!  Simple is best. You are not making a menu for people to sit and ponder.  You have one chance (about three seconds) to target your desired audience and then you’re done.
  • Use the right size type try to figure out how far away people will be from your sign when they read it and select your letter size accordingly. Check out the helpful chart below, it will help you build a readable sign.

MAXIMUM READABLE DISTANCE

READABLE DISTANCE FOR
MAXIMUM IMPACT

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