Most disappointing signs fail before they are built, at the moment someone guesses a size. Sign legibility is arithmetic, not taste, and the arithmetic is simple enough to run before you order anything.

The 10-foot rule

Every inch of letter height buys roughly ten feet of comfortable reading distance. A storefront that traffic reads from 150 feet needs letters around 15 inches tall; a menu board read from a 12-foot queue needs main headings over an inch. Measure the real distance — stand where your customer stands — and divide by ten. That number, in inches, is your minimum letter height.

Contrast does half the work

A correctly sized sign in low contrast still fails. Dark letters on light backgrounds (or the reverse) survive glare, fog and dusk; mid-tone-on-mid-tone dies at the first cloudy day. Lit signs solve the dusk problem outright, which is why lightboxes and halo-lit letters dominate roadside food service.

Placement: height and angle

Exterior signs read best mounted at or slightly above the natural sight line of approaching traffic — roughly 8 to 15 feet for pedestrian streets, higher for car-first roads. Interior menu boards belong just above head height behind the counter, angled a few degrees downward if mounted high, so the queue reads them without stepping back.

Let the mockup do the measuring

Send a photo of your storefront or wall with one known measurement, and our designers render the sign on your actual building at true scale in the free 24-hour mockup. You see exactly what the street will see before anything is built — which is the cheapest sizing mistake insurance that exists.