By Bob Behounek
Posted on Friday, May 24th, 2024
Whenever I’m on the subject of bold, clean, readable sign design, it’s a great opportunity to dig into the design tools from the past. As I have mentioned in previous articles, the more I noticed the design of older signs, the more I wanted to borrow those elements to blend with my current layouts.
Gee, with all the computer aids we now have at our fingertips, this process shouldn’t be very much work at all! We don’t have to get out the triangles, string, pushpins or even an old wooden yardstick.
The 1950s and ’60s found so many sign craftsmen doing great design work all at one time. Every city seemed to have a group of creative sign people putting out great signage! Bob Seelander, Edward Eberhardt, Bob Hunniford, Bill Boley… I could go on and on. These sign craftsmen ate, slept and breathed sign design.
In their finished layouts, you’ll find the frequent use of geometric and free form shapes. These shapes housed words, blocks of text and were used as classic space fillers to help fill out a sign design. These elements can cancel dead space and allow your eye to focus on the product or the sign’s main message.
Yessiree, there were squares, triangles, circles, stripes, dots and every kind of imaginable shape. Messages were broken up and placed into a sign design in order of their importance. Separating text is an art form in and of itself; simplifying the message within these shapes can be a tough go, too.
Our clients always want to pack everything they sell and service into these spaces. We have to keep reminding them that the folks who will be trying to read these ads have little more than a few seconds to grasp a sign’s message. They always give me this puzzled look on their face when I tell them that. It’s true. I’m amazed how little the general public pays attention to what they read and how little they are able to comprehend in that limited time.
On many of the signs I see these days, I see little use of shapes, multiple colors or more than one font (make that “type” for those of us in the sign business since before 1985). We usually must pull from our bag of assorted fonts, shapes and colors to produce a clean, colorful, eye-appealing, quality sign design.
Contrasts are simple to choose and use. If you use a block or sans serif font, then adding a serif letter will give contrast. Or, try a script style alongside a non-script style. It can give both styles extra appeal and create an interesting design.
It’s a good time to go out and purchase a simple color wheel and keep it at your side (like a gun in a holster). When you have a difficult time determining what colors contrast one another best, grab that wheel. Find a good contrast directly opposite one another with your new secret weapon.
To give you some interesting options for your everyday sign solutions, I’m going to draw up some common shapes, colors and types, put them on my computer and shake them up. Organizing our text in order of importance and placing the message within these shapes not only helps people read the signage better, but also creates interesting designs.
Grundy Pump is one of those problem vertical layouts. It’s going to be read from top to bottom. An arrow shape consumes one-third of our layout, pointing down toward the company’s services. The vertical sidebars, a few shades darker than the background, helps hold our “service” text within the sign. That helps our eye follow straight to the bottom horizontal color bar with that ever-important phone number.
Sam’s sign has a shape created to resemble a painter’s palette and act as an arrow, too. This sign has us look all the way to the right to tell us what Sam does. Note the bottom horizontal color bar is approximately one-third the height of our sign and gives the top two features a plane to sit on. Another color block encompasses more information telling us “what” type of restaurants Sam does.
T & H Upholstery is a blast from the creative design past! To create interest on a horizontal plane, the two-tone monochromatic panels split up all of that horizontal real estate behind T & H’s service rather than using just a solid uninteresting background color to sit there all alone.
Barb’s Canning Service finds the owner right smack dead center of this message, separating two color panels explaining Barb’s service. I’m not against having the text start at the left and run to the right, but a large oval shape with our friend Barb’s name cuts the message in half and creates a balanced, interesting design. I’m sure she will incorporate this look into a logo sometime down the road, too. (Free logo development, anyone?) Hey, I would rather give her an interesting design right from the get-go. You never know what it will bring you later.
Comstock Chevrolet encompasses three separate messages. Two-thirds of this ad tells us who and what is being offered. The round color shape separates the services from the rest of the message. We placed the kind of products sold in a typestyle that’s obviously different.
Be it round, rectangle, arrow, painter’s palette or diamond, these shapes can divide our text into separate messages. Our signage becomes easier to read and more concise because they eliminate clutter and the possibility of monotony.
The signage we produce today will always have constraints—especially with our country’s economy being somewhat challenged. Now more than ever, there are opportunities to capitalize on straightforward, well-thought-out advertisements that we don’t need to over-engineer to make more effective. Let’s compose designs that contain many contrasts in shapes, type and color. They will work well not only today but into the future, too.
This article appeared in the July/August 2008 issue of SignCraft.
Bob Behounek has spent over 40 years as a sign artist and pinstriper in the Chicago, Illinois, area.
