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Typography, color theory, and balance are three major design concepts that help create a professional sign. Although it is often overlooked in our industry, sound design in your signage absolutely effects how potential clients perceive your business or brand.

Part 2: Color

Color theory is a science in itself. Many factors contribute to how an individual perceives a certain color including personal preference and cultural background. Although this subjectivity is very prevalent in color theory, there is a broad overall guide to how many people perceive different colors.

Warm colors such as Red, Orange, and Yellow are the colors of fire, the sun, and fall leaves. Generally speaking they evoke strong feelings of warning, attention, authority and promptness. In many studies red tends to indicate promptness and yellow induces hunger. These colors are used in many fast food restaurant logos & signage for this reason.

Red & Yellow triggers thoughts of promptness & hunger, causing a direct psychological effect on customers.

Cooler colors like Blue, Green and Purple are often perceived to ‘quiet’ colors. They tend to evoke calm, relaxed and somewhat reserved feelings. Blue tends to also evoke thoughts of security and longevity. For this reason, banks and financial companies overwhelmingly favor blue.

Blue triggers thoughts of security & calm, and thus are favored by banks and financial institutions. Red is often used as an accent to trigger thoughts of prompt service.

Effectively choosing a color pallet for a design goes beyond the individual tastes of the designer or client. The color scheme should be researched and targeted to the demographic being marketed to, as it causes real-world changes in interactions between your brand and potential customers.

Importance of Sound Design in the Sign Industry

June 9^th, 2011 - Wes Button

Typography, color theory, and balance are three major design concepts that help create a professional sign. Although it is often overlooked in our industry, sound design in your signage absolutely effects how potential clients perceive your business or brand.

Part 1: Typography

There are many millions of pages written on the topic of Typography, and many of the basic tenants of solid typography apply to signs, vehicle graphics, banners, and so on. An often overlooked area of importance is whitespace. The space that surrounds your content, the spacing between lines (leading), and the spacing between individual letters (kerning) are very important.

 

Fig. 1: Ensuring that each letter is spaced according to the volume that appears between the letters, and not a linear measurement between the edges of each letter, is key.

 Fig. 2: Appropriate whitespace between multiple lines makes text easier to follow.

Fig. 3: The whitespace surrounding the sign’s text (padding) gives the text ‘breathing room’ and lets the reader easily navigate the message while reading. Although using up more of the space may seem like getting ‘more bang for your buck’, in reality you are getting a less effective and legible sign.

A banner is a very useful tool when it comes to getting a business noticed. Many businesses use banners as promotional tools. Others use them to advertise their company and what they do. Here at NW Sign Solutions, we have done a variety of banners for different businesses. We do many promotional banners for Panda Express as well as retractable banners for different companies to be used in the office or at a booth. Most banners done are temporary but some can be made in such a way that they can be used and re-used or left up for a lengthy period of time. 

Lately, banners have become a big part of what we print. With the good weather coming out, more businesses are using outside banners as advertisement tools to draw in new customers. Many are even getting ideas to use temporary banners at sport functions. Banners can also be a variety of sizes. This also makes them a popular business tool.