Discussion What's the most common design mistake you see made in sign design?

[ProSignTN]

I call that getting "PPT'd"

I saw people mention Bleeding Cowboys and Papyrus; 2 fonts we've laughed about around here a lot.

I hate Arial. I have a designer that will use it by default for simple stuff like VIN & DOT numbers. I tell her just because it's simple numbers, you can still be creative with font choice. I've threatened to uninstall Arial from her computer.

My favorite is when people use Arial and then squish it. Do you not realize there is a font called "Arial Narrow"?!

When I get a poor design from a customer, I will send them my own version. Sometimes they pick mine, sometimes they stick with theirs. At least I gave them the option and later when they figure out their design sucked they can't say I didn't warn them.

My father-in-law likes to say "we've done lots of really ugly signs for really happy customers". Sometimes people want what they want no matter what you try to tell them.

There is a "Skin Refresh" "medical place" here, which I think also does Botox. Their sign people used Papyrus for their logo. I just think dry skin every time I see their billboard.

 

[Bobby H]

On the topic of kerning (or letter spacing, tracking) here's one thing I find increasingly annoying: bad numeral spacing.

Many older font files will have only one set of numerals and their spacing will by default be set with tabular lining. That's great for number lists in columns, spreadsheets and math equations. It's usually lousy for signs. Yet countless signs in the field have numbers in the designs with that default spacing. The number "1" is a big offender because there will often be too much space on one or both sides of it. I've spent a decent amount of time over the years manually adjusting the spacing of address numerals, phone numbers, etc.

Many (but not all) modern OpenType fonts will have multiple sets of numbers in their character sets. One set of numeral figures will be in the usual tabular lining but the font file may include proportional lining figures, which allows the spacing of a single string of numbers to look far better. The font file may include old style figures in either tabular or proportional spacing. Numerator and denominator number sets are great for custom fractions. A default system font file like Arial has those number features built-in (unless someone is using an ancient version of Windows). So that makes a badly spaced phone number set in default Arial all the more irritating to view. The "designer" of that sign was obviously phoning it in that day.

 

[John Miller]

Let's not forget the ultra light swirly scripts that are OK for business cards but won't work for signs. A photographer gave me a file "just print it, its all ready to go" it was extremely light script and what was supposed to be black was
not a saturated black. I explained that to her but no, I was "being difficult" so what she got was script with a 1/8" stroke and dark gray letters. Impossible to read from 20'.

 

[Ready]

One MAJOR GIGANTIC ISSUE is missing from that list of choices above:
People stretching or squeezing the $#1T out of type to make it fit a given space.
It's very common to see default f***-off Arial treated in this manner. It's a hallmark of gutter trash sign design. Arial is at the top of the font menu. Never mind the hack probably has several thousand other choices available, including type families with far more native weights and widths. Nope. Just grab Arial instead of scrolling down for something more appropriate and versatile. Distort it to fit the space. Job done. VOMIT.

Arial is ugly enough as is, but looks even worse distorted. Some fonts look even worse than Arial when distorted, such as Gotham. Never distort a geometric monotone font like that. Anyone who squeezes or stretches Gotham really needs to get his eye sight checked.

Maybe you didn't understand DISTORTED FONTS. How do feel about Helvetica?

Bob P.

 

[Stacey K]

This grabbed my attention for all the wrong reasons...

 

[Bobby H]

Maybe you didn't understand DISTORTED FONTS. How do feel about Helvetica?

I don't understand distorted fonts? I've been in the sign business for nearly 30 years and have several years of graphic design experience prior to that. I'm no ****king rookie.

And I do understand the malpractice of people squeezing and stretching type. I refuse to let up on my hatred of it either. It's garbage.

There is a very obvious visual difference between a typeface that has weights natively designed to be condensed, compressed or extended versus someone grabbing plain default Arial and warping it. The visual differences are very easy to see. A true condensed or extended typeface will still feature vertical and horizontal strokes that remain visually balanced. That harmony is ruined in artificially squeezed or stretched type.

As for Helvetica, it is visually superior to Arial, even the original 1957 cut of Helvetica looks better than Arial. The Arial typeface is harsh looking. It's a Frankenstein hodge-podge of different sans typefaces thrown together into the same metrics as original Helvetica. Microsoft commissioned Monotype to create Arial because they didn't want to license Helvetica from Linotype. The 1983 "Neue" version of Helvetica has far more weights/widths than Arial. Plus it cleaned up some oddities in the original version. The 2019 "Now" version of Helvetica is further improved visually, plus a number of alternate characters were added. Last year a OTF Variable version of Helvetica Now was released. The variable version has weight, width and optical axis sliders.

Variable fonts that feature variable width can do the squeezing and stretching in a far more natural looking manner. Vertical and horizontal stroke widths remain in balance. Heading Now is one typeface that can go from looking like an ultra condensed movie poster credits font to being very wide and extremely bold.

There is so much more capability in type these days. And that makes it even more disgusting that so many people doing sign work still grab Arial in knee-jerk auto-pilot fashion and just distort the hell out of it. That habit is lazy as hell.

 

[bob]

I've been setting type in one way or another since I was a kid back before the most of your parents were born. From photo type setting to hard type in a stick from a drawer. If you've never been around hard type then most likely you'll not understand 'stick' and 'drawer'. Regardless, in all that time I'd never heard the term 'kerning' until I put up the One Shot and quills and started doing digital layout and vinyl. There is a fundamental principle in type setting. That would be "You Can't Violate The Type Body". With hard type, either hot metal or hand set, characters are cast on a rectangular slug. The slug forms the bounding rectangle for each character. That means it's physically impossible to, say, slide an 'A' close to a 'W' so that the 'A' is under the 'W'. But with digital type setting it's child's play to do those sorts of things, generating bad as well as childish typography. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. Other typographical mid-air collisions: Bending a line containing lower case characters. Bending script or italics. Using all caps in scripts, black letter, and most specimen type faces. These are most common with digital typography. There are exceptions to all of these and if you violate any rules of typography, have a real good reason for doing so.

I should think that the rather specific 'Bad Kerning' category might be expanded to the far more general 'Bad Typography'.

 

[kcollinsdesign]

I've been setting type in one way or another since I was a kid back before the most of your parents were born. From photo type setting to hard type in a stick from a drawer. If you've never been around hard type then most likely you'll not understand 'stick' and 'drawer'. Regardless, in all that time I'd never heard the term 'kerning' until I put up the One Shot and quills and started doing digital layout and vinyl. There is a fundamental principle in type setting. That would be "You Can't Violate The Type Body". With hard type, either hot metal or hand set, characters are cast on a rectangular slug. The slug forms the bounding rectangle for each character. That means it's physically impossible to, say, slide an 'A' close to a 'W' so that the 'A' is under the 'W'. But with digital type setting it's child's play to do those sorts of things, generating bad as well as childish typography. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. Other typographical mid-air collisions: Bending a line containing lower case characters. Bending script or italics. Using all caps in scripts, black letter, and most specimen type faces. These are most common with digital typography. There are exceptions to all of these and if you violate any rules of typography, have a real good reason for doing so.

I should think that the rather specific 'Bad Kerning' category might be expanded to the far more general 'Bad Typography'.

Kerning on type was originally designed into the sort for certain letters that needed to overlap the body of the sort to look good. The kerning was designed by the type maker, and the amount of kerning (along with serif sizes and other relationships) depended on the point size.
Spacing between letters (usually used only on uppercase line of display type) was achieved using slugs (thin metal bits inserted between the sorts).
The experienced typesetter seldom messed with letter spacing unless it was needed for center justification for newspaper and magazine galleys. The guy that made the type would spend months laboring over it; how the hell is some bumpkin in a print shop going to know more about his type than the designer!
My rule of thumb: don't mess with typespacing (kerning, as they call it these days) when setting text, but go ahead and do it all you want on all caps and display type.

 

[2B]

Need to add a button ALL THE ABOVE to the poll options

 

[Johnny Best]

If someone does not like Helvetica, or Arial, which like Bobby H, I hate it also, but just because Microsoft developed it.
My favorite in that class is Univers which looks the same as Helvetica to 90% of the population.
Like bob, I use to set type and did not know what kerning was until someone made a comment about some hand painted sign I had lettered when I was about 35 years old. I always referred to it as "spacing".

 

[Bobby H]

In the old metal type design some typefaces did have "expert" character sets that covered ligatures like "fi," "fl," "fll" and some other two letter combinations to improve letter spacing. Kerning pairs have been included in digital font files going back over 30 years, but things like expert character sets were often in separate font files. Now a single OTF can hold a bunch of those features.

Some new variable fonts, such as Helvetica Now, have optical spacing axis sliders. In the case of Helvetica Now Variable the letter shapes and letter spacing will both change based on that optical setting; it covers the "Micro," "Text" and "Display" ranges of the previous 2019 static version.

Regarding Univers, it's a pretty decent sans typeface. It's not quite as "neutral" as Helvetica. But it's clean and works in many kinds of projects. Any CorelDRAW user has access to the "Zurich" clone. It would be nice if Univers Next could ever go on sale. I'm not quite a big enough Univers fan to pay $399 for that 64 font package. Univers Next has a much better character set than any of the previous versions.

Terms like "kerning," "tracking" or "spacing" are often interchanged with each other. When I was a kid I was just used to the general term "letter spacing," which I still use now when talking to customers. Technically "kerning" is the spacing between two specific letters. "Tracking" is the overall spacing setting for strings or entire lines of text.

 

[MJ-507]

Not to mention how many fonts have the O drop below the I. It's so frustrating to type an entire paragraph, and have to offset all of the rounded characters to justify the bottoms to be even with the flat ones! /s

Why would you want to have rounded letters on the same baseline as the flats?

 

[Brandon708]

We do a lot of real estate signs and its like every small town real estate company uses the same logo. Company name with a roof and 4 square windows. PLEASE STOP!

 

[Scotchbrite]

Arial is a perfectly serviceable font, I dislike its use because it's a default font. It's like someone opened a Word doc, typed out their sign, and hit print.

 

[PatWhatley]

The most common design mistake made by people on this site is taking the advice of 90% of the people in this thread. Have you ever noticed that 90% of "graphic designers" absolutely SUCK at graphic design? Have you ever noticed that 95% of "old school hand painted set lead type" graphic designers were even worse? Yes, there are some absolutely astonishing old school craftsmen out there doing museum quality work...they aren't hanging out around here any more. I look at some of the responses in this post and they are absolutely ludicrous. "Don't kern". Have you lost your damn mind? Digital font creators, even those for exceptional foundaries (Charles Borges de Oliveira excluded) half ass the kerning of letters. Not tucking an A and a W together because "we didn't do that back when polio was still a thing" is ridiculous. And the discussion over Helvetica/Arial/Minion.....REALLY? With the THOUSANDS of better, more legible, better created fonts out there you're discussing bottom feeder free stuff? There was a time the cream of the crop was on here. Design critiques could be posted and a hand full of rock stars would steer you in the right direction, show you the way, guide you along and before you know it an amazing design would come out the other end complete with the knowledge of how to get there. Now....you'll get a bunch of people telling you to add in scripts, and drop shadows, and some sparkles to make it fancy and digitally print it on the cheapest material you can get and slap it on coro to make the most profit.....and at the same time you'll get the same number of people lying to you about how they charge 10 times that for it in their market and get it and drive their Ferrari's to the shop every day while fighting off the lingerie clad women at the door.

 

[Bobby H]

The most common design mistake made by people on this site is taking the advice of 90% of the people in this thread.

Care to name any names?

Unless I deliberately want to troll for a flaming argument I'm not going to personally accuse a bunch of people in this forum of sucking at what they do for a living. However, I do acknowledge the fact that a great deal of no-talent f***-ups are working in the graphic design industry basically because they fell into it after failing at other efforts.

Have you ever noticed that 95% of "old school hand painted set lead type" graphic designers were even worse?

No I haven't noticed that. Usually people who can actually hand paint lettering in any kind of attractive way can do a credible job at designing graphics. The thing I find more pathetic is a "designer" who has to use the computer as a crutch because he lacks the skills to draw or paint anything by hand. I can't speak for all people able to draw and paint by hand, but most of us are able to visualize things in our heads before before generating the ideas on paper, canvas or even a computer screen.

"Don't kern". Have you lost your damn mind? Digital font creators, even those for exceptional foundaries (Charles Borges de Oliveira excluded) half *** the kerning of letters.

No digital typeface is going to be perfect, much less have every possible kerning pair encoded into the font file. But there is a difference between making a few minor adjustments versus second guessing all of the kerning and tracking. Here's the thing: the typeface designer spent a hell of a lot more time adjusting the spacing of his typeface creation than any sign designer is ever going to do in second guessing the effort.

And the discussion over Helvetica/Arial/Minion.....REALLY? With the THOUSANDS of better, more legible, better created fonts out there you're discussing bottom feeder free stuff?

That comment makes you sound very ignorant. I get it that lots of people are tired of Helvetica. But tough f***king $H!+. Helvetica is still one of the greatest and most versatile, most useful typefaces of all time. BTW, where is there a free yet legit version of Helvetica? Most people are only acquiring Helvetica font files for free illegally. Helvetica Neue is a great super family. Helvetica Now and Helvetica Now Variable are great updates. There is NOTHING bottom feeder quality about it.

Nobody mentioned Minion. But I don't know why you're picking on it either. Minion is actually a pretty good serif typeface for long passages of text, titling and more. Arial? You can dump on it as much you like. I will not complain about that.

There was a time the cream of the crop was on here. Design critiques could be posted and a hand full of rock stars would steer you in the right direction, show you the way, guide you along and before you know it an amazing design would come out the other end complete with the knowledge of how to get there. Now....you'll get a bunch of people telling you to add in scripts, and drop shadows, and some sparkles to make it fancy and digitally print it on the cheapest material you can get and slap it on coro to make the most profit.....and at the same time you'll get the same number of people lying to you about how they charge 10 times that for it in their market and get it and drive their Ferrari's to the shop every day while fighting off the lingerie clad women at the door.

That sounds like you're describing some imaginary forum members. Are they actually made of straw? I've been a member of this forum for a fairly long time. I haven't read every discussion thread posted here, but I can't recall people bragging about how much money they were making, Ferraris they were driving and women they were getting.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

and drive their Ferrari's to the shop every day while fighting off the lingerie clad women at the door.

This here is why I got into the sign business. That cricut has really paid off.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

To Bobby's post... I've recently starting liking and using Helvetica Neue more and more. It is a good all-around font font for signs.

 

[Johnny Best]

Good for you Tex!

 

[Gino]

I think Pat was out drinking last night and had a few too many and decided to test out his keyboard when he got home.

Sheesh, there's always gonna be good ones and bad ones regardless or what era you're talking about, but most of what you said sounds like a buncha rubbish based upon looking inwardly....... in your state of mind last night.