Recipe For Success: 3 Ingredients For Better Corporate Sign Design

Need help designing or updating your corporate signs in Baltimore, MD? Look no further—we’ve helped numerous clients bring their brand image to life with high quality corporate sign design, and we can do the same for you.

To that end, today’s post highlights 3 design “ingredients” shared by all the best corporate signs, so you can fill the idea board fast at your next marketing meeting. Read on to learn more, or call (410)-877-6011 for our help creating your own recipe for success!

Recipe For Success: 3 Ingredients For Better Corporate Sign Design

Before we share this recipe for success, let’s get one thing clear: design is a big topic that doesn’t have a neat set of standards, and the same exact “ingredients” won’t work for everyone. After all, design is not just graphical in nature, not just about creating a pretty picture; the best corporate signs also convey meaning, value, and brand character, and their designs are always calibrated with specific advertising goals in mind. In other words, every design will be unique, just as every business and brand image is unique.

Having said that, if you reverse engineer some of the most iconic designs in business, you’ll find that they all share some common characteristics. Once you understand these basic ingredients, and you know how to make them your own, you’ll unlock the best of both worlds, building off of proven and familiar design foundations, while still being able to create something one-of-a-kind.

So let’s dive right in. These are 3 basic ingredients shared by some of the most successful corporate sign designs in the world:

• Graphic logos—It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that certainly appears to be the case when it comes to brand recognition. All of the best corporate sign designs are based around prominent graphic logos, whether they’re descriptive (i.e. combined with text, like the Burger King logo) or non-descriptive (i.e. without text, like McDonald’s classic golden arches).

  Why is that? Why not just type out your brand name, slap it on a sign, and be done with it?

  “Vision trumps all sense,” writes John Medina in Brain Rules. “Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.”

  Research by the Harvard Business Review seems to favor the drawing power of a descriptive logo, but only when the company in question did not market products or services that were traditionally associated with sad or unpleasant things, like bug repellents and funeral homes.

  So what’s the bottom-line? If you’re working on a new corporate sign design, research suggests you include at least one graphic logo element that is indicative of the type of product or service your company has to offer. Whether or not you pair it up with descriptive text is up to you, and our sign experts can help you determine what’s best for your situation.

• Distinctive typography—Whether or not it’s included as part of your logo element, your corporate sign design should use a clear, well-proportioned, and distinctive typography.

  In a 2019 report for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding, the following fonts scored highest in legibility tests: Gill Sans Uppercase, Avenir Medium Uppercase, Copperplate Gothic Uppercase, Helvetica Uppercase, and kabel Ultra Uppercase. But don’t think you’re limited to these options. We’ve got a comprehensive selection of proven-effective fonts at our fingertips, and we can even help you design something one-of-a-kind.

• Evocative color—Whether your brand image calls for the serenity of cool blues, the luxury of royal purple and gold, or the passion of a vivid red, there’s no denying that color conveys meaning. As such, color should not be an arbitrary choice, and brighter isn’t always better. The best corporate sign designs incorporate the psychology of color, tailoring their palettes to their brand goals and character, and we can help you do just that.

Get The Full Recipe: Book A Corporate Sign Design Consultation In Baltimore, MD

Call (410)-877-6011 or fill out the short contact form on our website to book a free corporate sign consultation and get a free quote on any custom design.