A short guide to designing beautiful house signs.

Rule 1: Give your text space

Having your text run too close to the edge of the sign always looks bad. Many beginners make this mistake in an effort to have text as large as possible. You can mostly use your eyes to adjust the spacing.

It's often tempting to squeeze text in, especially when you have a fixed width to work with. The solution is to reduce the text size or pick a more condensed font.

Rule 2: Make nice borders

Keep the border width and distance from the edge proportional to the size of the sign. Larger signs should have wider borders spaced further in from the edge of the sign. Smaller signs must have thin borders closer to the edge.

However, you need to leave a minimum of 7.5mm between the border and the edge of the sign. Remember, a border is a decoration and can be overdone. A sign may look better and less cluttered without a border.

Rule 3: Use colour contrast

Text colour must contrast with the sign background. Text without contrast looks weak and is difficult to see. Green on blue for example is very hard to read.

Choose gold or silver letters on a black or dark green sign; black or dark blue letters on cream.

Rule 4: Don't clutter your sign

Cluttered or over busy signs are irritating to look at. The human eye needs objects to focus on, and space around them. If your sign has many elements all vying for attention, the design will look bad. Try to have as few elements as possible.

Different shaped signs tolerate different numbers of objects before they begin to look cluttered. Oval signs can easily include a house number, name and a picture. Curved rectangles look best with just a name and picture and rectangular signs look the best when they only include text.

Rule 5: Line spacing

There should be more space around the text than between the rows of words. This improves the readability and focus of the sign.

A sign with big gaps between lines of text will look disjointed. Moving the lines closer ties them together, leaving a pleasing space around the text.