Have you ever driven by a banner hanging on a business storefront and wondered why on earth someone would choose “those” colors and “those” fonts? Have you ever seen a sign that you actually couldn’t read because the colors worked so against each other? Designing a business banner for a company can be a fun exercise that demonstrates your creativity, if (and this is an important “if”), you follow some basic design principles.
The first question you need to ask yourself is, why are you creating this banner in the first place? Do you have a special event occurring, so the sign will only have limited usage? This will affect the materials that you choose to use, possibly the colors (if the event has particular colors involved) and certainly the text you put on it.
Overall, think “less” when creating your design. White space gives your message a readability level that is important in the somewhat limited confines of your banner space. Too much of anything, colors, fonts or text, will detract from the overall impression your sign makes. Keep the minimum information necessary to get your point across, and that might be as little as your company name and contact number, or website address. Don’t necessarily include everything about your event, have them contact you or go to your website for more information. Not only does this make design sense, it also makes marketing sense! It gives you chance to expose more potential customers to your other offerings beyond the event.
Select only one or two clean and easily read (from a distance) fonts for your sign. Make sure they compliment each other and don’t clash. You also want them large enough to be seen from a distance.
Photographs can work nicely, but are also more expensive to include. Evaluate their use carefully and decide if they really help you get your message across or not. When it comes to colors, there are a few considerations you may not have thought about. For instance, certain colors because they lay close to each other on the color spectrum (cobalt blue and red, for example) do not play well together. They will appear to “shimmer” against each other and can very often be completely unreadable.
If you think you might need some assistance in your banner design, please contact Alphagraffix & Signs , especially for commercial signs in Oklahoma City.
