Without custom made signs, your customers miss out on the little touches that make your business unique. Many well-known logos use special symbols and visual tricks to hide double meanings in their design, and with specifically created pieces, these touches are there to be discovered by customers with keen eyes.
Some of these are open secrets. DesignWeek recently interviewed several professional designers on the logo tricks they like the most. These include shapes and letters built into the image that don't reveal themselves until viewers take a good, long look.
For example, one of the logos mentioned, Toblerone's mountain symbol, uses negative space to hide the image of a bear in plain sight. This is more than just a game: It has significance for the brand, because the bear is the symbol of Toblerone's birthplace in Bern, Switzerland.
Two of the creators interviewed by the source picked this one as their favorite. Simon Forster of Robot Food describes why he admires it and what it says to consumers.
"When you see it, it's unmissable," he says. "Gently pawing at the Matterhorn, the design doesn't force it, rendering it a lovely discovery, apparently representing the honey in the product. Sweet."
Other logos host secret messages or metaphors for their businesses. Amazon famously uses an orange arrow to underline its name, but not everyone notices that the arrow is between the first "a" and the "z." Supposedly, this implies that the company helps you find everything "from A to Z."
These little surprises only work if they fit seamlessly into the existing design of the logo. Custom screen printing makes preserving these messages easy without losing the bigger picture.