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 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 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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