Billboard Design Guide

When designing a billboard, keep three words in mind: Immediate, Visual Impact. You need to make your message brief and clear. This applies to the overall design, the imagery and, of course, the text. Viewers are often seeing your design from a distance, while driving at a high rate of speed. Grab their attention and deliver your message quickly.

The less said, the better. A few well-chosen words are all it takes to get a concept noticed and remembered. A lengthy sentence or multiple sentences will be more difficult to read and therefore, easier to ignore or forget.

Fonts with a mixture of thick and thin lines, extremely heavy or thin fonts are proven to be more difficult to read. Script fonts and overly-stylized fonts are also to be used with caution. Simple, regular or bold sans-serif typefaces have been proven to be the easiest to read.

Messages in all capital letters are generally more difficult to read than those that use traditional mixed-case. When using all uppercase, you should enlarge the text and minimize content to compensate.

When viewed from a distance, the lines between design elements can become less clear. Maximizing contrast will help ensure that your message will be legible from a distance. Extending the effective viewing distance of your design also extends the time that viewers are exposed to your message. Dark backgrounds with light text, or light backgrounds with dark text will work best. Overlaying text on a color of medium value or an image with mixed values is generally not as effective.

If you would like to preview how viewers will see your design, make it about six inches wide on your computer or tablet screen and take a couple steps back from it. You will notice that many of the subtle design elements will no longer be as noticeable. If you have a printer available, you may want to print out your design and stand back about ten feet. This method gives a more accurate idea of what your results will be. The illuminated screen tends to show a higher level of contrast than will actually present on the billboard (unless, you are displaying on a digital billboard).