Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Smart Strategies For Creating Powerful Retail Storefront Signage

By Kimberly Parker


If you own a retail business, you have to have customers. If that business includes a brick and mortar store, the customers have to be enticed inside. To get customers to the store a multiple pronged marketing approach is necessary. You will need promotional mailers, a great website, community outreach, and local media promotion. In addition, you must create compelling retail storefront signage. You can avoid the mistakes many make with their signs by following a few tested design tips.

Your signs must be visible to your customers. Before putting signs in the window or above your door, you need to look around and decide what location is most likely to maximize the sign's effectiveness. After determining that, you can go on to choose the size, design, and amount of copy it needs to have. It is critical that your signage be visible and legible.

Avoid cluttering the sign with graphics and copy. It is a big temptation for the inexperienced to fill every available space on a sign with graphics, logos, and copy. The problem with this is that the reader's eye can't decide where to go. When a potential customer glances at your sign, she will be confused. You can't expect the buying public to go the extra mile for you and try to decipher your sign. It just won't happen.

Along the same lines, don't be afraid of white space. It's already been established that too much stuff on a sign makes it hard to read. White space helps the customer's eye move through your copy. You need to leave about forty percent of your sign blank. That might be hard to do at first, but if you follow this rule your sign will be easy to read, concise, and clear.

Choose the fonts, typefaces, carefully. Some people make the mistake of using all capital letters in their signs believing that it makes the letters larger and easier to read. Once again you have to consider the reader's eye. When all the letters are the same height, the eye doesn't know how to navigate them quickly. When the copy is in upper and lower case, it leads the reader's eye through the copy.

Borders can be very effective. This is especially true when you're trying to get the attention of street traffic. Borders tend to focus the reader's eye on the body of the sign. The careful use of graphics is a good way to make people notice a sign. Graphics printed in full color have more effect than those printed in black and white.

Color combinations are important. There should be lots of contrast between the foreground and background colors. If you have a black background, the copy needs to be printed in a much lighter color, like yellow or white. The reverse is true. Dark backgrounds aren't always the best choice. Light copy printed on a dark background is harder to read than dark copy on a light background.

Advertising isn't cheap. You don't want to waste your money on ineffective signage. You can make your signs pop, without spending more money, by following these smart strategies.




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