Bad Copy [caption id="attachment_3200" align="alignleft" width="300"] Artistic Letters, But Can You Read Them?[/caption] It's hard to imagine that a bad sign layout could get past a designer, a quality control person and a customer, but you see living proof that it happens.  Take the issue of fonts that may look great on the screen or printed somewhere, but are just unreadable as a sign.  Always go for simple easy-to-read copy.  Avoid anything that is busy or fussy.  You may have some great graphics.  But if the eye isn't immediately drawn to your message, you have missed your opportunity to draw in a customer with your sign and likely wasted your money. Being able to notice and then read a sign quickly is of paramount importance.  Even with full sunlight on these letters, they are nearly impossible to read.  The business is a health club, think of all the walk-in traffic they have missed because people could not read the sign.   [caption id="attachment_3197" align="alignright" width="228"] A Serious Sign That Became a Joke[/caption] Next we have the problem of Kids Exchange.  A simple space would have eliminated this problem.  Maybe an apostrophe in KID'S. This sign is an object of laughter and ridicule rather than being worthy of being considered a viable day care center.  How this could have gotten past the sign company and customer is beyond most of us.  It would take a deinstallation, patching and painting and a new installation to correct this mistake and have the sign centered on the building.  A costly oversight.     Bad Sign Placement The next issue is that of sign placement.  We all appreciate big leafy trees, but many times they can block the view of your sign.  A sign installation in the winter when trees are denuded can look great until those leaves grow back and block the view for most of the year.  The trick is locating the sign away from trees, or if possible, keeping the trees trimmed enough to allow a good view. [caption id="attachment_3199" align="aligncenter" width="220"] Viewable during the winter, this sign is obscured most of the year.[/caption]   Poor Maintenance [caption id="attachment_3196" align="alignright" width="300"] An outage of the two letters DY mean the opposite of what the owners want it to mean.[/caption] Although a good sign will require little care, a sign with no care can become a liability.  If one has a partial outage of their lit sign, sometimes even the meaning of the sign can change. Here two letters lost their lighting and the whole meaning of the sign changed.  Notice also that the U in BUFFET needs some attention.  Partial outages can be caused by a number of factors, a bad transformer or power supply, a connection gone bad are just two examples. These are just three ways your sign message can actually become a deterrent to good business.  Others include a poor color choice where there is not enough contrast with the background, or just a bad color for reading, but we can get into that in  a future blog.