Helpful hints for when you design a for sale sign.
My biggest tip with designing a for sale sign is simplicity. But simplicity is not as easy as it sounds. With a few key tips, you will be able to make a simple and easy to understand sign in no time. Hopefully, it does the job and sells whatever it is that you are trying to sell.
At a glance
If there is anything on your sign that doesn’t help a potential customer in a moment’s glance, get rid of it. Remembering that the sign is most likely to be seen from a moving car, there is not enough time for details.
A for sale sign is not a flyer
It might be tempting to use the same design as your flyer but a customer has more time to read a flyer. So the details need to be different. It is worth paying more money for a different design to use for your for sale sign.
What are some ways so pass on information at a glance?
A pretty standard approach is using icons or symbols to quickly explain concepts. Take a real estate for sale sign for example: the houses amenities are easier to decode in symbol form. We all know the bed means bedrooms. So at a very quick glance, seeing the bed symbol and the numeral “4” next to it we know it has four bedrooms. Or a car symbol with a numeral “2” means a two-car garage. Use these symbols to get your message across quickly.
What about images?
In terms of image, consider using just one, the best one. If the house has a pool and this is a sell point, make sure the pool is in the photo. As a potential buyer is driving around, they can’t see into backyards to know if there is a pool or not.
Print quality
Of course, it is important to also consider the print quality of any images you use. The last thing you want is to destroy your company’s reputation with huge pixels. Vectors are best if you can use them. Always do a test print at 100% scale so you get a chance to see the quality. You can easily print out an A4 sheet of paper with a tiny snippet of the whole sign just to see the print quality (at a fraction of the cost)
Key takeaway:
Don’t forget, your sales sign needs to be seen and understood in less than a second and from far away.
