Monday 29 October 2018

Tips For Creating Effective Retail Storefront Signage

By Kimberly Parker


If you're in the retail business, you need customers. If you own a brick and mortar establishment, you have to get those customers inside in order to buy your product. You will need a multiple pronged advertising approach that includes a great website, local media advertising, promotional mailers, and community outreach. In addition to all this, you must have effective retail storefront signage. There are a few tried and true design tips that will solve the mistakes business owners make in this area of advertising.

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.

Don't clutter the sign with copy and graphics. It's tempting for some inexperienced owners to try and fill all the available space on their sign with clever graphics and written information. When they do this, the reader's eye doesn't know where to go. The result for a potential customer, just glancing at the sign through a window, is confusion. It certainly won't stop them and convince them to enter the store.

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 your typefaces, or fonts, carefully. A lot of people mistakenly believe using all capital letters makes their signs look bolder, bigger, and easier to read. Unfortunately, when everything is capitalized, the customer's eye can't navigate the words. Copy that is printed in lower and upper case leads the customer's eye through the your copy making it easier to read.

Borders are effective, especially if you are trying to capture the attention of automobile traffic. Borders pull the reader's eye to your sign and then into the sign. Graphics, used carefully, can be effective in getting the attention of the public. Full color graphics are more effective than black and white or two color graphics.

Color combinations matter. You need plenty of contract between your background and foreground colors. If you choose a black background, be sure the copy is in a light color such as white or yellow. The same goes for a white background. Be careful with a dark background. It is harder to read light colored copy against a dark background than the reverse.

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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