Everything You Need to Know About Commercial Signage Design

For a company with multiple locations, signage of all kinds is a major factor of financial success. Your signs, at every location of your business, must portray your unique value and desired message in an accurate and attention-grabbing manner. This helps to attract viewers to walk through your doors and utilize your products or services.

However, it is critical that all of your signs not only effectively advertise your company but also maintain your brand integrity as well as meet the physical and legal requirements of each location, store, or office. To accomplish all of these goals for your signage, the entire process must begin with commercial signage design services.

Commercial Signage Design – the First Step to Effective Signs

This is a necessary task in order to visually create your company’s signs to meet any requirements and specifications. While it may be often disregarded, specific design services must be included in your overall turnkey sign management process. Design services are necessary to value-engineer your signage across multiple geographic locations. In other words: design allows you to create economical signs that don’t exceed your budget.

Beyond value-engineering your signage, Egan Sign works with you or your Branding Firm to execute your brand, effectively. Reach out to us to learn all about it. Specifically, commercial signage design benefits your business’ locations through these actions:

• Brand-consistent creation of your messages and graphics
• Adaptation of every sign to its respective location’s unique physical constraints
• Adherence to each of your location’s zoning regulations and legal requirements.

The need for multiple new signs at your geographically diverse locations is certainly an urgent matter that must resolved, as soon as possible. However, proper considerations must be made to make sure that your commercial signage solutions actually relay the correct messages.

One of your most important messages is your company’s unique value or brand. Therefore, your signs must follow your company’s official brand guidelines. These guidelines dictate that your logo must be created with exactly the right colors at exactly the right size. Likewise, the font of your text must be identical to that which is used in your other branding documents or materials.

These are just two examples of elements of your commercial signage that must be properly designed to match your brand. Otherwise, your signs will not correctly communicate your business to new customers. Learn more about how your branding impacts signage in our blog post.

To actually see how your signs may or may not follow your brand guidelines, use prototypes. Prototyping services for your commercial signage allow you to visualize ideas through scaled models. Use professional designers to create real, physical representations of your concepts to better understand their relevancy to your brand.

This is an important step to devote time and resources to manufacture only the signage that best communicates your company’s brand. With Egan Sign’s turnkey sign management, you become partners with us to collaborate with your existing design firm or utilize our in-house design capabilities to produce the most eye-catching, brand-consistent commercial signage.

Adapting Each Sign For Your Unique Locations

After you ensure that all of your commercial signage is designed to match your brand guidelines, you must also design each sign to fit the physical constraints of your various locations. As a company with multiple stores or offices, you know very well that your locations are not identical to each other.

Your business inhabits buildings of different sizes in different areas: crowded downtown areas, suburban shopping centers, commercial business parks, etc. Each of these locations requires commercial signage that is specifically designed to fit the structure as well as the surrounding audience.

This involves the development of collections of signs that share fundamental branded design specifications but also have individual customizations for a variety of structures or buildings. These collections of customized yet fundamentally similar signs are called, sign families.

The development of sign families that include customized sizes and layouts is best done by experts in overall turnkey sign management services. A prime example: we know exactly how your sign families must adapt to the changing vehicular and pedestrian traffic of your diverse geographic locations.

See our Letter Visibility Chart, below, for specific sizes that allow audiences to read your signage. We use information from the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, Penn State, and the United States Sign Council to show viewing distance and minimum letter height.

With our experienced team of experts, design all of your commercial signs in a collaborative effort to create the best-fitting solutions at distinct geographical locations.

Meeting Every Local Zoning Ordinance & Landlord Regulation

After you have considered both your own brand’s needs as well as the physical needs of your geographic locations in your commercial signage design, you must finally consider the constraints of the surrounding municipality.

The cities, towns, or counties in which your stores or offices are located have complex rules that you must obey to display signage. Additionally, the buildings that your locations inhabit have landlords that may insist upon certain criteria for your signs.

Maneuvering through the various local governing agencies and landlord criteria can be confusing and time consuming if you are unfamiliar with the process. That is exactly why Egan Sign offers permitting services within our sign management process.

Before you create commercial signage that might not be approved by the Zoning Department, know and use each location’s set of zoning regulations and landlord criteria to design appropriate signs that will be approved for display.

If you’re already using design services, we readily adapt your existing design specifications to meet all applicable regulations. If you’re not working with a design firm, we apply our in-house design capabilities to create your commercial signage to maximize effectiveness.

What Happens After You Design Your Commercial Signage?

From initial consideration of your company’s branding to the final approval of your signs by municipal authorities, design is an integral phase in the creation and use of successful commercial signage. However, this is certainly not the end of the signage process.

Fully designed commercial signs must be physically manufactured and installed at your locations. And, your signs ought to receive regular maintenance to ensure their longevity. All of this requires expert-level project management for your company’s locations.

Utilize comprehensive sign management services to ensure that every detail of your commercial signage is properly handled. We give you signage design as just one of our services – including permitting and project management. Get all of the details of our sign management process when you download our Ebook.

How Are You Designing Your Company’s Signs?

Work with us to create designs that meet all of your needs. Tell us about your signage when you leave a comment or contact us.