Super Cheap Signs

Category: Sign How-Tos

  • 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

    LETTER HEIGHT

    100′

    30′

    3″

    150′

    40′

    4″

    200′

    60′

    6″

    350′

    80′

    8″

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    90′

    9″

    450′

    100′

    10″

    525′

    120′

    12″

    630′

    150′

    15″

    750′

    180′

    18″

    1000′

    240′

    24″

    1250′

    300′

    30″

    1500′

    360′

    36″

    1750′

    420′

    42″

    2000′

    480′

    48″

    2250′

    540′

    54″

    2500′

    600′

    60″

  • Size Does Matter (Sign Sizes, That Is)

    What can I say? Sometimes, I think of the headline before the blog topic. In this case though, it is relevant. People always come into the shop and ask us what sign size they should get.

    Signs come in a bunch of sizes: 9×24, 12×18, 18×24, 24×24, and 24×3 and that’s just yard signs. Throw in custom banner sizes and you can get a sign in virtually any size. But what’s the best size?

    I can tell you the most popular size, that’s the 18×24 standard plastic yard sign. It might not be the right size for your purpose, but it offers a good compromise between affordability and printable surface area. It’s large enough to be readable from a relatively fast moving vehicle, yet cheap enough to allow you to purchase several signs to increase your advertising area.

    Three things to consider when deciding on sign size:

    • Speed of the vehicles that will see your sign – larger signs work better at higher speed limits.
    • Complexity of message – a more complex message, requires a larger sign (see our 3 second rule to simplify your message)
    • Area of advertising zone – more signs are better for a large advertising area. Smaller signs are cheaper so you can get more for the same price.

    On our web site, you can experiment with sign size and quantity to get the best per-sign price before you even design the sign.