This is the first of our Jaipur brand notes, short observations on how businesses in the city present themselves. They describe patterns, not particular shops, and they are meant to be useful to anyone with a board above a door.
A signboard is read from a moving vehicle, across a road, in sun, dust, rain and the light of the shop next door. It is the oldest piece of branding there is, and the one most often decided by whoever is at the printer when the order is placed.
One message, set large
Most boards carry too much: the name, the tagline, six services, two phone numbers, a licence number and a logo. Read from the road, that is one grey block. Decide what the passer-by must know, which is usually the name and what you sell, and set that large. Everything else belongs on the door, the window or the website.
Letters that survive distance
Thin, decorative lettering looks refined on a visiting card and disappears at twenty metres. A sturdy wordmark with open spacing and a clear difference between letters holds up. Test it by printing the sign at a small size on paper and reading it from across a room.
Two scripts, one hierarchy
In Jaipur many boards carry Hindi and English together. The choice that goes wrong is giving both equal weight and the same size. Decide which language the customer reads first, set it larger, and give the second a quiet place under it. Match the weight and the character of the two scripts so one does not look pasted on.
Contrast, not decoration
Dark text on a light ground, or the reverse, with a strong difference in value, does most of the work. Pale text on a mid-tone background, and gradients behind letters, lose that in sunlight. Check the colour pair in black and white. If the letters vanish there, they will vanish in the street.
The board after dark
A sign is two designs: the daytime one and the lit one. Backlit boards, spotlights and neon change how colours look and can make fine detail glare. Ask the maker to show the lit version before it is installed.
A board that matches the rest
The customer who sees your board should recognise your Instagram page, your packaging and your listing on Google. That is the real job of a brand identity: the same name, colours and lettering on the shopfront and on the phone. If the board is a different logo from the one online, one of them is wrong.
Check local rules on size, placement and permissions with the relevant authority before you order, because they vary by location and can change. For the rest of the shopfront, see our note on the Google listing, which is the version of the board people read before they arrive.
