By John Hodgins
Posted on Friday, March 1st, 2024
Every sign maker knows there’s room for improvement in his or her layout skills. Learning the art of creative, effective sign layout is a lifetime process. There’s a lot to it. But there are some things anyone who creates a sign layout should avoid.
They cripple a sign’s effectiveness and wreck its legibility. Usually they are the mark of an amateur; other times they are the result of the customer’s demands to add more copy or decrease the margin to make the copy larger. Here are a few I see most commonly:
Avoid a black outline on red lettering.
Red type with a black outline is very hard to read. Even though they are two different colors, they are very close in value. (Value being the lightness or darkness of a color.) Consider white as a value of perhaps one and black the value of ten. The red may be a value of eight and the black a value of ten. A letter and its shadow should have a more definite value change. Squint and look at this picture. The colors run together, especially in this example where there is little space between some of the letters.
Leave a healthy margin.
The full copy on this sign is only visible when you are right in front of it. Get a copy of Mike Stevens’s book, Mastering Layout, and read it. Mike was great at showing the importance of having enough negative space around the edge of a sign. This sign is an excellent example of why that is important.
Some sign makers will argue that the customer expects his sign filled up more than Mike’s examples. Most customers know nothing about pleasing layout. They will appreciate a nicely designed sign and not really know why.
Don’t let things go downhill.
When my dad and stepmother were alive and living in Florida, they went out for dinner every night. Naturally their appetites were jaded from all the restaurant food. One of my dad’s favorite sayings about a restaurant was, “They’ve been slipping lately.” It looks as if this inn has been going downhill, too. Angled lettering is interesting, but it is much nicer if the lettering goes uphill instead of down. This place is out of business.
Never use script as all uppercase.
That’s right: Never. One of the first rules of typography is to never use all capitals in any kind of a decorative or script type. It is too hard to read. This typestyle is called Park Avenue. Like many script typestyles, the uppercase characters look odd. They don’t always look even with the baseline of the letters. The only thing worse than doing it with script is using all capitals in Old English text styles.
The generic look doesn’t sell vegetables – or anything else.
UGH! Black Helvetica medium on white corrugated plastic. That’s just about as low as you can go. But, I can understand how this could happen. The farmer probably built himself a little produce stand and wanted a really cheap sign.
I once had a customer like this in my shop. I quoted a sign on overlaid plywood. Too much. I quoted it on plastic. Still too much. I finally told him to buy a marker at Kmart, get a piece of cardboard and make his own. I wasn’t kidding. What do you have to lose if you offend a customer like that?
But as cheap as the price on this one had to be, it would only take a few minutes to improve this sign 1400 percent. First, prioritize the copy. We are selling “Produce” here, not “Farm Fresh.” It wouldn’t take any extra time to put green vinyl on the plotter. It wouldn’t take any extra effort to use a nice letter style. A border would also help. I’m assuming the customer hung this sign crooked all by himself.
The late John Hodgins worked from his home studio in Batavia, New York.
This article appeared in the March/April 2004 issue of SignCraft magazine.
