The cheapest signage mistake we see monthly.
Not the ugly signs. The right signs, in the wrong place.
The signage brief usually arrives on the wall of a nearly-finished hotel or restaurant. The type is set, the material is chosen, the fabricator is booked. What we're asked to do is "make it look right" — often the day before the launch.
The mistake almost never lives in the type or the material. It lives in the placement. And it's almost always the same placement mistake.
The eye line
People read signs at eye height. Not at the height of the concrete anchor the electrician left in the wall. Not centred on the door frame. Not "wherever there's room after the fire panel." Eye height, for the tallest 90% of the humans who will walk past it.
The number is somewhere between 1.55m and 1.65m for the centre-line of the main mark. We've measured hundreds of installations. The signs that read well from ten metres away all sit inside that band. The ones that don't, don't — regardless of how good the mark is.
What actually goes wrong
A short list of the placement mistakes we've untangled in the last six months, all on rooms we did not design:
- Restaurant entrance mark set at 2.1m because that's where the beam happened to be. Nobody standing at the door can see it without stepping back into the street. - Interior wayfinding centred inside 1.6m-wide doorways, so at any normal walking distance the sign is hidden behind whoever is walking in front of you. - Building directory installed under a spotlight that reflects off the acrylic at exactly the standing viewing angle. The names are unreadable between 10am and 2pm. - Boutique window mark hung at head height for the shopfitter, who was 1.92m. Anyone else has to look up.
What we do
We start every signage brief with a walkthrough at the actual eye height of the people who will use the space — guests, buyers, staff, service. Not from an elevation drawing. Not from the fabricator's mockup. Standing in the space, at the entrance the customer will actually use, at 1.60m.
Everything else — the type, the material, the finish, the LED spec — is secondary. Get the placement right and mediocre design reads as considered. Get the placement wrong and the best mark in the world reads as an accident.
Talk to the pair.
Send a short brief. If it's a fit, you'll be on a call with both of us within a week.