Tips For Drawing In The Buying With Your 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.

Make sure customers can see the signs. Before you put anything in the window or in front of the business, you have to determine how visible the sign needs to be to maximize its effectiveness. What you decide will determine how big the sign is, the way it's designed, and how much copy you put on it. Visibility and legibility are critical.

Cluttering the sign with graphics and copy will defeat your purpose. Sometimes people try to write a novel on a window sign and decorate any leftover space with clever graphics. All this does is confuse the reader. Her brain can't tell her eye where to look first. The whole thing becomes a blur. This won't result in a new customer excited to walk into your store and buy something, which is your goal.

White space can be your best friend. If copy is cluttering your sign, customers will have trouble reading it. They will not stop long enough to figure out what it says. White space makes it easy for the eye to move through copy. White space should take up about forty percent of your sign. That may seem like too much, but designers say this is one way you can ensure your message comes across as concise, clear, and easy to read.

Fonts, typefaces, have to be chosen with care. A common mistake people make is to capitalize too many words on a sign. Their theory is that capital letters look bigger, bolder, and get more attention. These people are not considering the reader's eye. If all the letters are the exact same height, the eye has trouble reading them as words. Copy printed in upper case and lower case is what the human brain is used to seeing and what is most discernible to it.

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 contrast is extremely important if you want people to be able to read your signs easily and quickly. A dark background needs light colored copy and vice versa. You should use light color on a black background sparingly because it's hard to read unless you are only using a few words, like in a starburst. In this case it can be very effective.

Advertising is expensive. You want yours to be as visually effective, and cost effective. As possible. Following these proven techniques will make that happen.




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