By signcraft
Posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2025
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you don’t get much say in the layout of a sign. Customers get ideas in their head, have strong preferences, or they just don’t care about your thoughts on the layout. Often they have seen a design online that they like and want a version of that—even if it may not work well for their sign.
Every sign person deals with this. One sign designer encountered it recently when a customer brought photos of some old fire engine lettering that he had seen online.
“Almost every sign presents some sort of design challenge,” says Lane Walker, Solo Signs Reno, Nevada. “As a designer you work to come up with an effective solution to that challenge. When customers see another sign that they like, they are really seeing the design solution to someone else’s design challenge—not theirs.
“Most likely, their sign has a different challenge. It could be the length of their company name or the amount of secondary copy they want. It could even be the descenders in their name. They may want a script, but some words get very hard to read as a script. The design they brought you may not be appropriate for the image of their business. I usually take a few minutes to explain this, and sometimes it works.”
In “Working with the customer’s layout ideas” you’ll hear—and see—Lane’s approach to this increasingly common issue.
