Sign Making for Designers 3 Easy Steps

Sign making is very different than designing for other mediums--even different than billboard because you have images to work with. Making a text only sign seems simple, but it's that simplicity that will ruin the effectiveness of a sign faster than you can say Helvetica, if you don't apply a few basic rules. Rules that I will kindly detail for you now:

Distill the Message
It's fairly common that people will ask for what basically amounts to a paragraph on a sign. Paragraphs belong on paper, in books or magazines, NOT on signs. So what do you do? Distill it.
A woman came to the shop needing a sign because her dog ha behavioral issues and she needed something more specific than "beware of dog." She suggested to me that "warning, dangerous dog on premises" go on the sign. The size of the sign she wanted was about the size of a sheet of paper. Putting all that on a sign would make the letters too small to be a warning. I asked her what she was trying to alert people of. She said it was that the dog would bite anyone who it was unfamiliar with. I suggested "Why not just put, 'Warning DOG BITES' on the sign." She was skeptical, until she saw the difference.

By distilling the message, we determined purpose. A sign's purpose will dictate a lot about its design. Which brings us to step 2, Deciding on Emphasis.

Decide on Emphasis
Not every part of a sign can be bold or it will lose it's meaning. The various parts of a sign must be broken up in order to create an information hierarchy. Going back to the dog example. The words "Dog Bites" are the largest things on the sign. Why? Because the word "warning" is almost irrelevant. If you were going to enter this woman's yard to attempt to sell her a vacuum cleaner and saw "DOG BITES" you would go to the next house right away because you wouldn't want to be bitten.

When deciding on how a sign should be laid out, you first have to determine which parts you will emphasize. Once you've done that, you can move onto step 3, arrangement.

Arrange the Message
Lets go back to our design again and change it up a bit. If we were to go with her original idea and try to arrange it, we'd end up with something like this.

Not bad. A different arrangement but not as effective. "Dangerous" is far too long to try to stretch on a sign this size. And being placed inside a box, it now competes with "dog" for supremacy on the sign. Arranging the sign means bringing all the elements together to look cohesive. The purpose of the sign is the message, the message should never get lost on the sign.