By Bob Behounek
Posted on Friday, December 12th, 2025
During my career in the sign industry I have witnessed plenty of signage, both good and not so good. The good ones were produced by quality companies that employed craftspeople with high standards. Those sign people took a certain pride in their handmade signs, and there was a friendly and competitive creativity among them. As a result, our clients received some outstanding workmanship.
I’m afraid the example I’m going to redesign in this issue was not created under such circumstances. It’s commonplace today—little regard to quality layout, readability or overall function. Not knowing the original situation, it’s a stretch to find a positive take on it.
To convey a message, an effective sign requires some or all of the following elements: proper proportions, a dominant feature, balance, flow, contrast and, last but not least, some unity to all of the above. You can’t overlook those fundamentals and expect good results.
At first, this example struck me like those movie credits you see in the back of the DVD case. Can you picture that? All the letters the same height, width and weight, packed together tighter than sardines in a can. I believe they do those credits like that on purpose, to pack a lot of important information in the small space just to satisfy the legal requirements—not for the sake of readability.
This sign is strictly an informational piece with no dominant feature and minimal contrast. The red and blue colors are the only hope to help the reader separate and understand this message.
Without a business name or logo, our eye is pushed towards “Open to the Public” and “Do It Yourself” or Installed as our dominant feature. It looks to be a one-to-two ratio design, possibly a 4-by-8 panel. There is a ton of information presented here. It’s not impossible to have a lot of information on a sign, but it does need to be managed.
My first mission is to prioritize the information. I’ll separate what needs to come forward and what can retreat, then use color and size to do that—a balancing act if you will. Informational signage can present unique challenges, no doubt. Given the subject matter, such signs can be quite uninteresting sometimes.
As in previous design workshops, one of the best solutions is to get some help from geometric shapes. These shapes create individual messages within the bigger message. Sculpting these geometric shapes into a general “sign flow” can help our reader’s eye go from one message to the other easily.
With so much text involved, this will allow it to be read faster and more efficiently. Nonetheless, readers will likely need an extended period of time to comprehend everything presented here.
Let’s look at what I have created here. First, there are two separate messages that needed to be conveyed. Apparently one of our client’s goals is to state that their products can be handled in two ways: by you or by them. The second is that this establishment is open to the public. The two reversed, dark blue shapes have been molded into soft arrows reading from left to right at the top, sending your eye right into the actual sales items.
Utilizing the original blue and red colors, we have established a natural message flow from top left and bottom right continuing on to the lower left and lower right. This spells out our given services in shape and color and reads as one unit.
Next, I separated our dominant message with a new color: yellow. This information is totally separate from our services. Splitting our dominant information with this new color and shape allows this information to sit on an island of its own. Now we have two different information blocks on one sign, using a simple arrangement of colors and shapes.
My intentions were to create two separate messages. Our reader’s eye will flow through and comprehend the two messages with ease. Those two, dark blue soft arrows help that process. These are old-school principles no doubt, but effective.
I don’t want to call this a design for a primary sign, since there still has to be a separate sign to identify the business. One could call this an unintentional informational design.
Hey—even so it’s got to work, right?
This appeared in the January/February 2015 issue of SignCraft.
Bob Behounek has spent over 40 years as a sign artist and pinstriper in the Chicago, Illinois, area.
