Yard signs can be an effective way of reaching an audience with your message and helping to raise awareness. They can also be meaningless if they’re not designed and placed correctly. Whatever your reason for putting up yard signs, and whether or not you do it in conjunction with banners, budget posters, fundraiser signs, or anything else, the key to getting the result you want is having the right design from the beginning.
KISS
You may have heard this acronym before: keep it simple, stupid. It’s used by people in many industries as a personal reminder not to overcomplicate things. The more information on your sign, the more cluttered it looks, the longer it takes to read, and the less effective it is. Always put up the least among possible to get your message across.
Stick to One Side
Don’t try to make one sign do double duty for both sides, because it probably won’t work. One side is bound to be harder to read. Additionally, given the right light the message on one side may actually bleed through and make the message on the other side of your yard signs impossible to read.
Contrast
Speaking of easy to read, it’s crucial that you use colors that contrast with one another. That gets attention. If you use colors too similar to one another, they’ll fade out and be unreadable. Use the color wheel to make your choice (just put “color wheel” into a search engine to find out what this is.) Colors opposite to one another on the wheel are the contrasting.
Point the Way
When you’re using yard signs, you don’t have a lot of room to explain how to reach a place or do a thing. The best way to help people find something or get to a particular place is to use arrows. No one has to slow down to read: they can just follow the pointer.
One Message
Keep your yard signs focused on the one message you want to communicate right now. You can’t fit everything on there, and if you try you’ll just lose the important stuff in a sea of unimportant information. Once people have come to your establishment, you can explain all the other stuff. Use your yard signs just to get them in the door.
Fonts
Font choice can have a huge effect on how easy something is to read. You typically want something without serifs–that is, those little wiggles on the ends of letters. You want something blockier as that’s easy to read from a distance and in smaller type. Some good fonts for yard signs include Arial and Verdana.
Logo
In most cases, you should not use your logo on a yard sign. If you’re big enough to have a logo that everyone recognizes instantly, then go ahead. But if not, you risk people squinting to make out your logo (“What’s that say, honey?”) and missing your big message altogether.
Go Big or Go Home
Always get the biggest sign you can afford and use the biggest font size that will get your message out there. When you’re dealing with people who are driving down the road at speed, you can never be too careful in making sure they’ll be able to read your message.
Yard signs can work really well when you make them work for you. Make sure they’re big enough, placed well, use arrows, and convey your most crucial main message. Then you’ll get the results you want from your yard signs.
