Since July 2007, smoking has been prohibited in public areas and the regulations have required businesses to implement very specific signage in order to comply with the new laws. Failure to display the correct signage can result in a maximum fine of £1000, so it’s crucial that you learn about the important regulations.
Highly visible ‘Caution: Wet Floor’ signs are frequently seen in public areas such as shops, schools and local authority buildings, even during the daytime when customer footfall is high. In an ideal world, businesses would delay cleaning until after working hours in order to ensure that members of the public are not required to walk over potentially slippery floors but this is not always possible.
Has this ever happened to you? You are driving to a place you have never visited before, and are following the road signs. At the first roundabout, your destination is clearly signed, yet when you reach the next, it appears to have been removed from the face of the earth. Guesswork driving isn’t the most enjoyable game to play!
If you’re in the retail business, you probably already appreciate the importance of good signage in capturing customers’ attention and drawing it to particular merchandise or offers, and of clearly labelling goods and prices.
Here are some top tips for making the most of signs in your retail premises:
People are probably in a rush in your store – so understand that. With everything from Vine and YouTube videos to Tweets shrinking, and attention spans decreasing rapidly, there’s no time for densely worded signage.
As a business, your image and branding need to say everything about you that a customer might want to know. What you sell, how you go about your business and the fact that you are trustworthy are all major elements of your corporate identity that your image and branding need to convey.
They draw the eye in a way that text sometimes doesn’t. We humans are visual animals and our eyes pick up on anything that looks interesting or unusual. In other words, adding an image to a sign makes it more likely that the sign will be noticed in the first place. Remember we all adhere to warning signs when driving, and signs that give us direction to ensure we remain within the law, a no smoking sign for example. Most of these have no words at all.
If you type ‘mistranslated signs’ into your search engine, you will discover a wealth of – often amusing – examples of safety signs, street signs and other types of signage from around the world that have mistranslated information. Things like instructions and warnings have been rendered into English so poorly that their original meaning is lost.
Many people have a negative impression of this idea – perhaps from seeing some examples of overblown posters packed with flowery or nonsensical phrases. Yet, whenever we are allowed a peep on TV inside the dressing rooms of top sports teams, there they are!
With the green agenda high on the list of every set of corporate objectives, making sure that your business operates in an environmentally friendly and energy efficient way doesn’t just help the planet, it also helps maximise output and profits. Often, timely reminders to adopt energy saving measures can have a measurable impact on meeting your environmental targets. So why not use custom signs to prompt your workforce towards eco-friendly behaviour?
If you’re a business owner, you’ll no doubt be aware that there are plenty of regulations regarding which signs are vital on your business premises. If you’re only a small business, some of these health & safety signs may seem irrelevant – do you really need a first aid sign or a no smoking sign, for example, if there are only two of you on the premises?
We’re all aware that we should wash our hands at certain points in time: before handling food, after handling raw meat, after using the toilet and so on. For businesses, signs advising people to wash their hands are a key part of legislation – more so for some business types than others.
When it comes to health and safety signs, you’ll no doubt notice that different types of signs have different shapes: triangular or diamond shapes for warning signs, round for prohibitive signs and so on. But have you stopped to think about the different colours that are used in safety signs and why they are actually used?
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