How to Plan Signage for a New Business
Opening a new business comes with a lot of decisions. Your location, buildout, employees, equipment, inventory, marketing, and opening date all need attention. Signage should also be a part of this planning process, not something you remember a week before your grand opening. Here’s how to get started.
Start With Location
Before making any signage decisions, look at the property. Consider how far the building is from the road, how fast traffic moves, where customers will approach from, whether the building is visible from the street, and whether there are any existing signs. Your signage needs to work in the real environment where customers will see it, even surrounded by other businesses, traffic, landscaping, and competing signs.
Strategy & Goals
Think about what you need your signage to accomplish. Your signs should help customers recognize your business, find your location, understand what you offer, and navigate the property. Decide what success looks like for you—maybe it’s getting noticed from the road, building brand recognition, making your location look more professional, or communicating information to your customers.
Don’t try to make one sign do everything. Your primary building sign may only need to identify your business, and perhaps a directional or monument sign can tell your customers where to go, while your door sign provides store hours. Your signage strategy shouldn’t stop once customers walk through your doors. Interior signs can be used to promote sales, improve navigation, ensure legal compliance, and reinforce brand identity. Interior signage, or a lack thereof, can directly impact your customer’s experience and trust.
Rules, Permits, and Landlords
One of the biggest mistakes new businesses make is designing a sign before finding out what the property owners and local regulations allow. Sign requirements can vary based on the city, zoning district, sign type, size, and illumination. Before finalizing your design, find out whether a permit is required, the maximum sign size, any height limitations, temporary sign rules, and any property owner or landlord requirements.
Forward Signs regularly works with the permitting and installation side of commercial signage, helping businesses navigate the process before installation.
Think About Readability
Your signs need to be understood quickly. Think about how much time a driver or a pedestrian would have to see, read, and process your sign. Consider letter size, contrast, color, lighting, viewing distance, traffic speed, and the actual information you need to relay. More information isn’t necessarily better. Your primary sign should make it immediately clear who you are, where you are, and what you do.
Get Your Artwork Ready
If you already have a logo and established branding, gather your artwork before the sign project begins. Vector files (.SVG, .AI, .EPS) are preferred for most signage projects because they can be scaled without losing quality. Useful files to gather may include your logo, brand colors, typography, brand guidelines, and photos of the building.
The Earlier You Plan, the Better
A commercial sign project may involve:
Site visit
Measurements
Design
Permitting and review
The timeline depends on the project, materials, fabrication requirements, permit review, and other factors. If your opening date is important, build signage into your schedule early. You don’t have to know exactly what sign you want before contacting a sign company, that’s part of the process. A good signage plan starts with your business, your location, your visibility needs, and the applicable requirements.
Opening a new business in Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, or Southeast Indiana? Forward Signs can help you plan your commercial signage strategy from the beginning. Contact us today to get started.
