Signs in Stowmarket
Trade units, industrial estates and a lot of vans — signage that has to work at speed and at the door.
Two reading distances, one business
Stowmarket sits on the A14, and its business base leans towards trade units, light industry and firms whose customers arrive by vehicle. That splits almost every signage brief in two, and the split is usually where things go wrong: the same information gets put on both signs, at the same size, and neither works properly.
The far sign — estate totem, unit number, board at the entrance — has one job, which is to be read from a moving vehicle by someone deciding whether to turn in. Name, unit number, nothing else. The near sign, at the door, is where opening hours, services, accreditations and the phone number belong, because that is the only place anyone will stand still long enough to read them.
The van is the sign that does the most work
For a trade business working out of a unit here, the vehicle is seen by more people in a week than the unit is in a year, and it is seen in exactly the places the work comes from — parked outside a job, on a driveway, at the merchant. It is the cheapest advertising a local trade owns and the most commonly wasted.
Wasted usually means one of two things: a phone number too small to read from the car behind, or a livery so busy that nothing survives being glanced at. A van that carries the trade, the town and a number in a size that can be read at 30mph outperforms a beautiful wrap that cannot. Lettering, part wraps and full wraps are all fitted at our Ipswich workshop, and the van goes straight back to work.
The signage a unit needs that nobody budgets for
Beyond the name over the door, a working unit needs a set of small signs that only become obvious once someone is standing outside it: which entrance is for deliveries and which is for visitors, where a driver should park, what the opening hours actually are, and the statutory and safety notices that have to be displayed somewhere sensible rather than wherever there was space.
None of it is expensive, and all of it is done twice if it is left until after the main sign is up. Specified together, it uses the same colours and the same typeface as the frontage, so the unit looks like a business that has its affairs in order — which is most of what a first-time visitor is judging.
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