Would a red sign be best for your business? Blue? Green? We look at what goes into picking the perfect hue.
When deciding on the look and feel of your retail business, settling on the perfect design for your signage is a big piece of the puzzle.
With so many design possibilities at your fingertips, it can be hard to decide what kind of visual branding is going to best suit your shop.
Especially when it comes to colour options, your choices can play a major role in how customers feel about your business. Should you go for a ‘warm’ colour, or a ‘cool’ colour? Is blue better than brown? What should you pick?
In this post, we’re going to dig into the topic of colours for shop signage and share some expert tips as to which colours are best used in which scenarios.
Choosing colours for your signage
You may be wondering if your use of colour on signage is really going to make a difference. Red, green, yellow, does it matter? Can you not just use whatever you want?
The reality is that some colours work a lot better than others in certain situations. We can probably all agree that you wouldn’t put a bright pink sign on a solicitor’s office and you wouldn’t put a moody black sign on a children’s playground.
Those examples are pretty straightforward, but for other situations, it may not be so easy to tell which colours are going to be appropriate. If you’re running a butcher’s shop, is it better to have a green sign or a blue one? How can you tell?
It’s important to establish right away that there are no universally “best colours” for all types of signage in all situations. Colours that would work for certain shops in particular situations are not guaranteed to work for different businesses in other contexts.
This makes the topic a bit more complex than being able to simply say, “the best colours for signage are red, blue, and green.” It all depends on your situation, and our expert designers consider various factors when helping our customers bring their signage ideas to fruition.
Why would some colours be more suitable than others?
There are a few different aspects to the question that may make it prudent to favour particular signage colours over others.
Some of these factors can include:
- The branding and positioning goals of the business. Different colours can suggest particular brand associations and feelings. It’s no accident that McDonald’s classic red-and-yellow ‘M’ branding is bright, sunny and approachable, while Cadbury’s Dairy Milk wrappers have a luxurious purple sheen. These colours have been carefully selected to influence the way you feel about the brand, and you can leverage this effect to give your customers and visitors certain subconscious ‘gut feelings’ about your shop through the use of carefully selected colours on your signage.
- The physical properties of the business premises. A good signage designer will take into account the environment in which the sign is to be viewed. After all, a black sign in a dark corner probably isn’t a good idea if you want it to ‘pop’ visually. You may want to check if your sign is going to be submerged in shadow, illuminated by direct sunlight, or if there are any clashing colours in the environment that might distract the visitor’s eye or cause an unpleasant aesthetic effect.
- Your shop’s place in the local business ecosystem. You will probably want to be mindful of the colours and branding elements used by the competition so you can avoid clashing with them. After all, you will want to stand out with your own unique identity, and if customers see two unrelated shops in the same niche with the same signage colours they are likely to come away with a confused branding impression.
When deciding which colours are going to be right for your shop, all of these factors and more can be crucial.
Do you have existing branding materials that you need to match? Are you planning to get an illuminated sign, and do you need coloured lighting? By working with an expert signage company you can work out all of these details and get the perfect sign for your business.
Colour psychology and association
Colour psychology is a pretty deep subject that is probably beyond the scope of this post – although we have written about it at length before – but in a nutshell, the idea is that some colours naturally suggest certain subliminal feelings in most people.
We already touched on some examples of well-known brands using particular hues to create feelings that are ‘sunny’ or ‘luxurious’, and this is the kind of thing colour theory can be used to do. For example, green tends to make people think of nature and health, while blue often suggests an air of calmness or quality.
When thinking about your shop signage, it’s a good idea to consider what sort of ‘brand feelings’ you want for your business. Do you want your shop to seem luxurious? Down-to-earth? Playful? Sophisticated? Serene?
By really putting your finger on how you want customers to feel about your retail brand, you can then use that to help guide your colour choices and promote those associations. Your visitors may not end up knowing exactly why they feel the way they do about your company, but it’s a powerful effect.
Of course, if you’re using two or more colours on the same sign you also have to ensure that these hues work well together. Not only will you need to ensure they don’t clash, but also that they have enough contrast between them to ensure readability for text and other design elements.
In conclusion, there is no one “best colour” to be used on all shop signs, all of the time. It very much depends on the style, character and niche of your business – and there are a plethora of reasons why you might choose one hue or another for your signage.
Please contact us today to find out how we can help you with your shop sign project – either by calling us on 01233 625383 or by submitting a message via the website.