Food, glorious food

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The world of food is inarguably fantastic. Treating yourself to exotic foods, comfort foods and heaping mounds of dessert is as good as it gets. The problem often is that some food establishments make it harder to sell you food than it should be.

And that’s not fair. Especially to the food.

Paper menus might be hidden, graphic design may distract from the actual food, or menu displays might be indecipherable. In any case, your poorly displayed food options make it harder for customers.

After being stumped, confused customers wander out of food establishments and look for somewhere that makes ordering simple.

How readable are your menus?

When ravenous customers wander into bustling restaurants, cafes or takeaway joints, they’re often immediately prowling around for a menu to read. It benefits many businesses to have their menus displayed in a way that makes it a simple exercise for customers to peruse the available food offerings.

Menus that display products well, sell products well. Pure and simple. If your food offerings aren’t on easy display, particularly with the help of some flashy graphic design, people won’t buy them. If you woke up at 4am to bake bread and no one knows that you sell bread – nobody wins (especially the bread).

Making your food truck stand out

Food vans seem to be following hungry mouths everywhere they go. But with their being so many options for consumers when they consider food trucks, how do they decide? This is particularly true when there are two food trucks with the same cuisine competing for attention.

Picture them, side by side.

As you stand there, eyes darting between both vans, stomach rumbling and breathing in aromas that cause you to salivate, you might think to yourself: “they both sell pasta, but which has the tastiest pasta?”

It often comes down to the food truck that is the most aesthetically pleasing. Consumers are drawn to products that are well presented.

Satisfy hungry stomachs

If you’ve ever experienced terrible food signage (and everyone has, at some stage), you know how important it is to stop it. Even if you own a business and your signage is alright, consider this – could it be better? Could it be great, even?

Stick On Signs are fierce advocates of proper signage and making your delicious food known to the world. Contact us to find out how we can make the world aware of your delicious wares.

The 4 Most Important Things to Keep in Mind When Writing a Retail Sign

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When writing, designing and producing signage, there are four important things you must first consider…

Specificity

One of the most important things your consumers — or audience — wants is specificity. There are so many people in the business of selling that, to make your product or service stand out amongst the generality of other businesses in the same field, you need to run with the details. How exactly will a consumer benefit if they choose your product or service?

Simplicity

While it’s important to be precise, it’s also just as important to keep your signage simple. Finding the right balance of these two can be challenging but worth the time drafting and redrafting to do so. The message needs to be crystal clear but if you provide too much information, the audience will quickly loose interest. Get to the point. A good way to make sure your message is by the “five second rule”. This rule states that if your message (both visual and text together) takes more than five seconds to convey, it’s not simple enough.

Conciseness

This is similar to simplicity but has more to do specifically with the text on your sign. Being succinct with your text is one way to ensure you meet the requirements of the five second rule. If you imagine your message is a headline in a newspaper, you get a better idea of what is concise and what isn’t. If it runs over too many lines and would look ridiculous as a newspaper headline, it’s time to go back to the drawing board! Abridge the text where possible: take out prepositions, use superlatives, reduce the sentences to encapsulate what you are trying to say in fewer words, use design and textual hierarchy to point viewers towards the most important information.

Appeal

Generally speaking, the fundamental reason for a sign, particularly in retail is to get your audience to do something. Appealing to your demographic is what the design and creation of a sign is all about. Signs are advertisements and they should always be treated as such. What is the purpose of the sign? This is an important fact to know before you do anything else. What do you want this sign to do? Once you have set a goal for your sign, you can create an appropriate call to action.