HOW-TO
By Mark roBerts
Design
Comparing the Before and after
Things to do “before” you come up with a good “after” sign.
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look forward to my job every day. I talk to some interesting people, and I get to ask and answer my clients about the ideal sign that will work for them right now. Having thirtytwo years of sign-making experience under my belt, I’ve seen some spectacular signs, graphics, and commercial vehicle lettering. Still the challenges remain. How will this project become my best ever? The easiest way I know to stay sharp and creative is to see a graphics challenge and work hard to command that challenge into a great, effective sign. Sometimes that challenge means working on sign projects that are designed to replace an older sign. Years of rain, snow, wind, and hot summers can zap the life out of a sign before one knows it. Soon what was once an effective advertising creation is now a mere shadow of itself—wasting away its last days. This month, I’ll show the dramatic difference between the “before” and the “after” states of signage with similar messages at a nearby dry ice plant. For this project, I had to keep in mind: Signs that advertise have to shout! to be seen because of the small space in the time it takes the viewer to read and assimilate the information. Most new versions of these types of signs will feature different sentence structures—perhaps even some graphic breaks and contrasting
Sign Builder Illustrated // February 2013
1 colors. Creating impressions after viewing the message is what the advertiser dreams about. My first assignment here was to remove the existing decals from the doors of the ice plant’s eighteen-wheeler cabs and replace them with newer versions. As you can see, these decals had been through their fair share of wear-and-tear (Photo 1). The company originally told me that they wanted copy-only decals that were “more to the point.” However for years, this dry ice company had used a ’60s-style cartoon penguin as its advertising mascot (Photo 2). Dry ice. Penguin. My imagination had taken off! I touched up this classic “cool” bird design on
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