Southport Printing Services

The A frame outside a shop has one job in one place. The A frame that goes to the Saturday market, the Sunday event and the Tuesday pop-up has a harder life: packed, driven, unpacked, stood on grass and gravel and pavers, and expected to look sharp every time. Portable duty changes what to buy and how to design it. Here is how A frame signs on the Gold Coast get specified for businesses whose location changes with the calendar. What travelling does to a sign Handling wear. Every load and unload is a chance to scuff a face, bend a leg or lose a fixing. A sign that lives outside one door gets handled twice a day; a market sign gets handled dozens of times a weekend, usually in a hurry. Surfaces vary. Concrete footpaths are the easy case. Grass hides uneven ground, gravel shifts, and sand and decking both defeat some base designs. A frame that stands square on a footpath can rock on a paddock. Wind without shelter. Shopfront signs get some protection from the building. Market signs st...

Most pull up banners are designed on a screen at about a third of a metre, and read at a trade show from about three. That mismatch produces the banner everybody has seen: a wall of small text, three logos, a QR code near the floor, and a headline nobody can make out from the aisle. It printed perfectly. It just does not work at the distance it is used. Designing for the viewing distance is the whole discipline. Here is how to lay out pull up banners on the Gold Coast so they do their job. Start with where the viewer stands A pull up banner is read from a distance, in motion, in a fraction of a second. At a trade show, people walk past. In a foyer, they glance while heading somewhere. At an event, they see it from across the room. Which means one message. Not three. One thing you want the person to know or do. And a hierarchy that works at a glance. The eye should land on one element first, take one other thing second, and that is all you should expect. Design at actual size, and c...