How To A Design A Sign: How Do You Make Your Sign Visually Interesting?

Contrast is one of the easiest design principles to grasp. After all, it's easy to see how two objects are different.

Just be careful. You don't want everything in your design to stand out in stark contrast to its surroundings. Viewers won't be able to decide what's important if everything is contrasting, and that can distract from a message.

Essentially, contrast creates visual interest by placing two different objects next to one another. How can you create more visual interest and contrast?

You can vary these elements on different levels:

1. Size
2. Fonts
3. Emphasis
4. Color
5. Value
6. Shape

One Logo, Many Looks

I have created an imaginary business for our discussion of design principles. It's a team of certified financial advisers.

Here is the beginning of a logo for The Professional Group with examples to show how you can build contrast into your designs.

The Professional Group presented in the font Standard Block. Pretty boring, huh?

I've introduced contrast via size in the design above. I've made the most important word, Professional, the largest.

Contrast by typography. Now we've added Times Square, a serif font, to the Standard Block sans serif font.

Above is an example of contrast by emphasis. Now "the" and "group" are in italics. Contrast can be as simple as having one part of a title in a regular font, and one part in a bold or italics font.

Now here's an example of contrasting colors. Except that these colors don't really differ all that much, do they? Because the words "the" and "group" are small and italic, the black text appears almost gray. Both the blue and the gray are fairly similar in color. You know there's two colors in the logo above, but almost hard to tell that it's blue and black.

Just above is an example of contrast by value. All of the words are in the same blue color, but the value of the blue color is lighter in the words "the" and "group" than in the word "Professional." Once again I've made the important word in this logo – "Professional" – stand out by making it a darker value. You want to emphasize the important points.

There's no doubt that the blue and green above contrast. Not only do they contrast in color, they contrast in feeling, too. Blue is a cool color and green is a fresh color.

I think that there's little doubt that the final logo is more interesting than the original logo, even though it's not really a finished logo. Contrast is what makes it a visually stimulating design.

Before:

After:

With just a few simple changes, there is a dramatic shift in the style, feeling and appearance of the text. Instead of plain, ordinary and boring, there is visual interest and a corporate look and feel to the design.