Do you have a font or style of imagery that is consistent across all of your signage? If so, the result will be a stronger brand presence. One example of this comes from a seemingly unrelated source: the New York City subway system.
Slate recently reported on a special style guide to designing subway signs in that city, published in 1970, that has taken the internet by storm. After being scanned page by page in 2012 and posted on the internet, this vintage look at the New York City Transit Authority's history of design shows how all of the numbers and letters followed a specific pattern. Through a Kickstarter campaign, the manual has been resurrected and made available to the masses.
Writing for Businessweek, Belinda Lanks described why the revived manual seems to have struck a chord with a modern audience, and what we can hope to take away from its success.
"The interest in the manual speaks to a typography-savvy public that can identify Helvetica as the official font of the MTA and knows it's a sans-serif typeface," she writes. She also described the way New York subways signs looked before these designs were adopted decades ago: "They were not only inconsistent in terms of style but also in where they were placed, so straphangers didn't know where to look for directions on how to get from point A to point B."
Making a major change to your design, in terms of clarity and readability, will help your business to develop its customer base and stay successful. Invest in POP signs and other on-site displays to make your business easier to understand and more inviting to customers.