A Great Way to Increase Your Signage Revenue

What is a great way to increase your signage revenue?

The answer is to make your customer’s primary sign highly effective. By a “primary sign”, I mean the main outdoor sign – the sign that drives the location awareness and foot traffic.

How do you do that? By making sure the sign has conspicuity. As we covered in the 8/30 post, one conspicuity factor is the recognizability of forms and shapes.

What is another component of this recognizability of forms and shapes? The letter kerning. Kerning impacts the reader’s ability quickly to read a sign – and make the “stop or not to stop” decision. To put it another way, kerning impacts a sign’s legibility, and the legibility then impacts a sign’s overall conspicuity and subsequent effectiveness.

How big an impact can kerning have? Consider the following examples:

This overly tight kerning makes a sign more difficult to read. The tight spacing almost makes each word look like a single object.

Here is the same sign with a different issue:

Too much space between letters also makes a sign less legible. Can you read it? Sure. Is it more difficult to read than correctly kerned letters? Yes. Why make your customer’s sign any less legible?

Now check this example:

These letters are correctly kerned. Which of these three examples is easiest to read (particularly if that reading will be done from a car?) Which is quickest to read? Think also: if this were your business, which of these signs would you want?

Also, remember that kerning and tracking are not the same thing. Tracking is the adjustment of space for groups of letters and entire blocks of text. Kerning is the adjustment between individual pairs of letters.

So what can we observe here? First, if you are producing the signage artwork for your customer, remember not to trust the default software kerning settings. Manually adjust the kerning until the letter spacing is perfect.

If the customer has provided artwork with a visible kerning issue, it is your responsibility to point that out prior to producing the sign. If the customer insists on making the sign “as is”, that is their choice. You’ve done your job.

The result of good kerning (and the subsequent legibility, which helps with conspicuity) is worth it (as a vendor of wholesale channel letters, we are particularly careful about this issue.) Small adjustments can make the difference between a sign that just looks good, and a sign that looks excellent. An excellent sign will produce results for your client – and grow your business by bringing them back to you for other signs.