In times past, a sign was a sign, was a sign. Someone took a flat surface, usually square-ish in shape, and painted information on it. This sign was then hung on a building or placed in a frame that allowed it to stand on or in the ground. Advancements in sign technology, from light-up signs, to neon, to digitization, have allowed advertisers and brand specialists to envision a world in which signage can almost scream “Look at me!” to potential customers.
Is that a good thing? Think of the world of Blade Runner, where flashing digitized signs in multiple languages strobed all day and night, saturating the darkness with illumination, but ultimately becoming no more than the light pollution backdrop to everyday life. Yes, there can be too much of a good thing, and when it comes to signage, and your brand identity, we believe in the old school, less is more, approach.
Before you order signage, or even your business cards, it’s important to know what you want people to think of when they think of your company. What do you want your brand to be? Let’s say, for instance, you’re in the interior design business. What is your niche market? Are you an ahead-of-trend architectural darling, or do you delight in creating deeply comforting spaces? How can your logo, advertising, and sign choices show the world who you are and draw the right clients through your door?
Let’s decide you’re in the architectural end of design, providing interior spaces to match contemporary exteriors. Contemporary design is about sleek lines, graceful large curves, perhaps an odd punch of asymmetry, and angles. Cool colors rule the day with metallic accents. With those ideas in mind, how do you picture your company’s name? Is it the logo, or is there a logo attached to it? What font provides the image of contemporary design your firm embodies? What color scheme invokes confidence, stability, and the forward thinking architectural design requires?
Color is especially important, as study after study has shown it causes subliminal emotional responses, and in some ways you’d never anticipated. For instance, if your competition are all using a gunmetal font color, you’d stand out by going shiny silver or engraved black. And as noted above, it is absolutely possible to do too much of a good thing. Too much color can create a sense of dis-ease and your customers won’t even know why they feel put off.
You can probably come up with even more questions before you have all the answers, and that’s a great thing. The more you know about why and how you want to identify yourself in the marketplace, the better your brand will be. In the case of our example, you would likely decide on a modern sans serif font, a base color of either a clean white or a sleek gunmetal gray, and either a bluish, metallic, or even black print color. Whatever the ultimate decision, it’s important, vital, to carry it through in ALL your media: advertising, business cards and stationery, and signage.
For a contemporary firm looking to boost its lux-factor, signage including standoffs with silver hardware imputes stability, modernity, and innovation, with nary a screaming digital pixel in sight.