Your business signage is first impression you can give to potential customers. Whether you advertise your business through window graphics, car wraps, or even banners attached to airplanes, it’s a real shame when your advertisement actually discourages clientele because you make these simple design mistakes:
- Not having a clear purpose for your advertisement. Are you trying to gain brand awareness? Do you want customers to remember your location? Decide what you want the viewers of your signage to take away from your advertisement and center the design around that goal. For example, if you want people to remember your location, you don’t need to give the phone number a great amount of real estate.
- Using a trendy font. Repeat after me: Do not use comic sans. Do not use papyrus. Ever. As a font becomes popular, every sign company starts cranking out signs with it and then not only it is not memorable but your sign looks identical to the dry cleaners, e-cigarette shop, and the daycare on the same street. Look for a quaint font that will really build your identity and brand.
- Forgetting to make readability your first priority. When your sign is on the side of the road for drivers to glance at for two seconds as they speed by, you must focus on legibility, or they will get nothing at all from it. Stay away from calligraphy or fonts that are hard to read in a glance. Use contrasting colors that stand out against each other.
- Not being consistent. Even if you’re a small business and don’t have an official brand per se, having consistent lettering and colors across everything with your name on it will help consumers associate your design with your business.
- Creating cluttered signage. Potential clients are going to look at your advertisement for a few moments. Make every component on your sign worth the space that it takes up. Not only will clutter overwhelm the viewer so that they don’t take anything from it, it will make an unattractive advertisement and create a poor first impression.
- Neglecting to consult a professional designer. If you have a dog-walking business, you are probably amazing at handling dogs. If you are a professional painter, your painting skills are probable too legit to quit. If you are a handyman, you’re probably the handiest of them all. If you are any of these things, you probably don’t have a background and training in professional graphic design and your signage will reflect that. Don’t despair if your business doesn’t have the funds to hire a professional graphic designer; just talk to the sign company you use for printing your advertisements. Your sign company probably has a graphic designer in-house who can offer suggestions to create the best signage for your business.
Did we forget to mention any important design mistakes that small businesses make? Please leave us a comment with your input below.
