• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

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

What's the most common mistake people make when designing a sign?


  • Total voters
    87

Bobby H

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

In some respects it can be difficult to avoid using Helvetica since it is so clean and neutral looking. These days I try to vary it up with some other "current"
commercially purchased faces (Proxima Vara, Avenir Next Pro, Futura Now, Heading Now, etc). Helvetica still has a certain gravitational pull to it.

I've used Helvetica Now quite a bit in recent years. I really like the Display range of fonts, they have a certain kind of elegance to them. One complaint: Monotype made the Variable version of Helvetica Now where the width axis goes from normal to compressed. The width axis doesn't go the other direction to extended (or wide). I imagine that means Monotype roll out another sequel to Helvetica Now that addresses that. For now I have to use the older Neue range for any extended weights.

There is one way users can get some weights of Helvetica for free in a legit/legal way. MacOSX and iPadOS has some weights of Helvetica Neue included as system fonts. But not the entire family.

Gino said:
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.

I guess drunk-blogging is a cousin to drunk-dialing.
:D
 

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
What's with hating aerial and helvetica? How many branding guidelines do you get where some form of helvetica Neue is adopted as one of the fonts? For copy, it's great. The majority of OEM warning labels on machines use aerial for the copy. There are many places where using anything but those fonts looks out of place. Wearing a black suit is fine, too many people here think they need to be the one who shows up to the funeral in the white suit.
 

bob

It's better to have two hands than one glove.
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
In my best Cousin Vinny voice "You're serious?" You've never done any and lettering? All round top and bottom characters extend slightly above and below the top and base lines. Characters like 'S O Q G C U 2 3 5 6 8 9 0'. This is because these characters do not have sufficient visual weight on their respective top and base lines to be just touching their respective line. If they did they would appear smaller than the rest of the characters. Thus they extend slightly above the top and below the base lines to make them appear to be the same size as the rest of the text.
 

Gino

Premium Subscriber
How 'bout paisley ?? Maybe some mod dots for more definition ?? Just keep the colors in close approximation so as not to create a glazing appearance for the other mourners.
 

bob

It's better to have two hands than one glove.
I find Helvetica and all of it's cousins to be completely lacking in character. I do signs, not annual reports. If I need to add text merely to meet some requirement or another I'll go for one of the sleep inducing sans serif faces. Other than that, not so much.
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Notarealsignguy said:
What's with hating aerial and helvetica? How many branding guidelines do you get where some form of helvetica Neue is adopted as one of the fonts? For copy, it's great. The majority of OEM warning labels on machines use aerial for the copy.

With Helvetica it gets used in branding more often in some industries than others. Defense technology companies and aerospace is one example. Retail is another. Target mixes Helvetica Neue with Neue Haas Grotesk in its advertising. The differences between the two are pretty subtle. I use various forms of Helvetica a lot for signage aboard Fort Sill and Altus Air Force Base.

Arial gets used in a lot of official documentation since it's such a default sans serif typeface in Microsoft Windows. Many applications (including CorelDRAW) set Arial as the default typeface when the software is first installed. So many users don't bother changing anything, just like they save all their files in the My Documents folder. Nevertheless, I think Arial is an ugly typeface. Some of the glyphs are just awkward looking. Overall it has a harsh appearance to me. I also dislike Arial because I see it so often in cheap, trashy-looking signage. Multi-tenant pylon signs with lots of little flat white acrylic panels will often feature lots of squeezed/stretched copy set in Arial Bold or Black just cluttering the whole thing. Low income areas in many towns will have lots of distorted Arial used on signs for check cashing places, pawn shops, laundromats and pay day loans outfits. Arial just has a blight-vibe to it. But that's just how I feel about it. YMMV.
 

Johnny Best

Active Member
I like Frutiger, is that alright? I am just a young kid out of art school with student debt trying to glue signs together in New Jersey.
 

Attachments

  • patrant.jpg
    patrant.jpg
    174.9 KB · Views: 155

Gino

Premium Subscriber
I used to wear fruit of the loom. Does that count ??

Copperplate and Playbill are good ones for y'all.
 

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
I'm still waiting for photos of these lingerie clad women Pat was talking about. As the saying around here goes....photos or it didn't happen.
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Johnny Best said:
I like Frutiger, is that alright?

I like Frutiger quite a bit, its "95" Ultra Black weight was an early favorite of mine. It's great for big channel letters. I prefer Frutiger Next for any italics since they're true italics, not just something that has been slanted. For instance the lowercase "a" in italic versions of Frutiger Next is a single story "a". Frutiger is a great "humanist" sans. I think some other newer typefaces, such as Myriad Pro or Windows' Segoe typeface steal some style cues from Frutiger.
 

kcollinsdesign

Old member
Um, it’s not that simple. First, I sure will never buy this popular American mindset that anyone can be a graphic designer or artist. That’s part of where this scourge of DIY design originates. They figure since computers are involved and you supposedly don’t have to do any manual drawing or painting by hand then anybody can do the work. They don’t consider the fact art and design talent is a lot like being able to sing. Most people can’t sing well at all. But these people want all the “glory” of doing the design work themselves anyway. Worse, they usually make zero effort to learn any of the technical issues that go with the job. That includes understanding things like gamma limit differences between RGB and CMYK, or just making the stupid design legible to passing motorists.

We just completed one anger inspiring project with a lady opening a health oriented grocery store. Of course she insisted on designing her own logo. I got second guessed thru multiple revisions on the building sign and street sign face. The problem was her brand didn’t mean anything and the important “grocery store” lettering was really tiny in relation to it. I tried adjusting around that by creating some new lock-ups that fit the existing sign cabinets much better. Same fonts, just different arrangements. She wanted it looking like her logo, regardless how tiny the vital lettering might be or just how much negative space would be left on these faces. And she wasn’t even buying new faces, just sticking some vinyl graphics on old existing faces. To top it off, her artwork was RGB-based, using a max gamma bright green color. So she wanted to gripe about how the green vinyl we spec’ed wasn’t as bright as her green, nor was any attempts to print it.

Let’s face it. Many customers doing their own DIY design work don’t know what they’re doing and bake all kinds of stupid, unworkable garbage into their “art.”



Way too many people in the military think PowerPoint is the only “graphic design” application that exists. We do a lot of work for the Army. PPT files come with the territory. At least we get paid for the raster to vector conversion jobs.
Are you confusing "gamma" with "gamut"? Common beginner mistake.


Gamma:
{\displaystyle \gamma ={\frac {\mathrm {d} \log(V_{\text{out}})}{\mathrm {d} \log(V_{\text{in}})}}.}


Gamut (color gamut): defines a range of colors within a spectrum of colors.
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2022-01-29 at 7.23.57 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2022-01-29 at 7.23.57 PM.png
    43.6 KB · Views: 156
  • 01_6.jpg
    01_6.jpg
    36.9 KB · Views: 176

Ian Stewart-Koster

Older Greyer Brushie
Their poor-looking business card was allegedly 'designed' (Imagine Vistaprnt templates) therefore they want you to do it exactly, on their car and billboard, with no understanding of why that's not going to work.

Too much use of dreadful quirky modern wedding fonts.
Too many fonts with zero prioritisation.
Medium value text colours over a medium value background, with no outlines to help legibility.
 

Ian Stewart-Koster

Older Greyer Brushie
It's in reference to the title topic, answering the question of listing several of what I consider to be common mistakes these days


 

Boudica

I'm here for Educational Purposes
Oh. That was so specific, I thought you were referring to something in the 143 post discussion.
 

signbrad

New Member
Kerning on type was originally designed into the sort for certain letters that needed to overlap the body of the sort to look good.

This is true.
The noun kern and the verb to kern are not new terms, but old ones, though the shade of meaning has changed considerably from previous centuries.

From Royal Dictionary, page 663, by Charles Fleming (1844 edition):
" To KERN, v. Among Letter-founders; to hollow out the under part of a letter, the eye of which projects beyond the body."

So, kerning was the process of cutting a notch or mortise into the underside of a slug of type allowing the letter face, the raised portion (also called the eye), to extend beyond the type slug and overlap an adjoining letter. The illustration from Wikipedia of the two letters "T" clearly shows this overlap.


800px-Metal_type_kerning.svg.png

By Metal_type.svg: User:Booyabazooka, User:Jensonderivative work: Rick Yorgason - Metal_type.svg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8942107


Kerning always meant tightening the space between letters

Kerning was a way of decreasing the spacing between two letters. It never meant adding space between letters. Greater spacing was accomplished by adding blank spacers. (In fact, fonts could be purchased that consisted of nothing more than these spacers). Kerning was an especially common practice for allowing italics to overlap, eliminating awkwardly large letter spaces created by the slant of the letters.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the English noun kern, from the 1680s, is thought to derive from french carne, meaning "projecting angle; quill of a pen." It described the notch on the underside of a quill to create the nib, that is, the delicately pointed "business end" of the quill. In fact, just as a delicate quill point could easily be damaged, so too could the relatively weak overlap created when a letter of metal type was kerned. These projecting parts could easily break off and render the piece of type useless. Hence, kerned letters took on different design configurations in an effort to strengthen them and prevent breakage. Some projecting kerns were made beefier for strength, and foundries eventually even created built-in kerns when casting letters.

Notice in the photos of kerned italics in the page linked below how a layer of metal was left remaining behind the letterforms to reinforce them. This was one way of reinforcing the overlaps to strengthen kerned letters:
Kerned Italics

From page 18 of the book, Type (1918), an instructional manual for apprentices:
Drawings of Kerned Italics

Note the variety of notches/mortices cut into larger sizes of type in the following link:
Large sized type kerning


Kerns, in the beginning, were painstakingly added to type slugs by hand using files, knives and gouges, but eventually, saws were developed that allowed for quicker cutting of kerns.
Today, of course, kern is used almost exclusively as a verb and simply refers to the adjusting of spacing between individual letter pairs of digital type.
 
Last edited:
Top