Real estate signs say more about you and your residential or commercial real business than they do about the properties they advertise.

Let’s look at the best practices for that raise awareness about your brand and start a conversation with your potential clients.

Each of these signage options offers unique dimensions and mediums on which to print. And, the amount of space available (and the shape of that space) will directly influence your sign’s design layout.

If you don’t feature your on your sign, the sign becomes worthless from a branding awareness perspective. Not only that, each state has specific legal requirements that signs feature certain information such as name, the name of the broker and more. Be sure to check your state’s department of business and professional regulation for more details.

Start by making sure that your most valuable visual branding tool—your logo—is featured prominently on your sign. For more on real estate logo design, read . Also, remember to use your brand colors on your signage to help create a consistent visual presence. This will help potential clients get to know and quickly recognize your real estate business.

Creating a consistent visual presence across all of your signage will help develop familiarity and trust between your business and your audience. For all the people who walk or drive past your signs, most of them are probably not looking to buy a house or lease a commercial space at that time. But, if you’ve used your signage to create a consistent visual presence over the years, you’ve planted a seed.

When those same people find that they do want to purchase a home or rent a commercial space, they’ll remember business.

Signs are intended to communicate. Every design choice you make should support the sign’s ability to communicate clearly. Your real estate open house sign, for example, won’t attract visitors if they can’t understand what it says.

Font choice is one of the most important elements of creating an effective and easy-to-read sign. Sign pairing easy-to-read font with elaborate script logo. Image courtesy of .

And, the rules for signage are different than in many other forms of graphic design. While you can get away with a fabulous script font (like the Ebby Halliday logo on the sign above) or funky serif typography in a logo, that won’t work for regular sign copy.

To be effective, signage must be easily read from a distance and from a moving car. Otherwise, your message won’t reach a large portion of your audience.

This applies to your and all other information on the sign – make sure everything is crisp and easily readable. For any non-logo text, aim for straight-forward serif and sans-serif fonts.

Landmark Sign Group these as their top five best signage fonts:

These fonts (or others like them) can be paired with your logo to create a readable sign that clearly communicates your brand identity. That’s the best of both worlds.

For more on picking the right fonts for your business, .

Elegant and readable sign with plenty of white space. Image courtesy of . White space is the area of a design that is left without lines, color, shapes or text. Put simply, it’s the empty space. However, white space (which isn’t always actually white) is a vital contributor to an overall design in terms of both aesthetics and readability.

Mark Winter of IdentityPR : “The empty space surrounding text and graphics is just as important as other design considerations. There is a tendency to want to “fill up” the available area with as much copy as possible. But when text is crowded, it becomes harder to read. Thirty-to-forty percent of the sign’s face area should be left as white space for optimal readability.”

Aesthetically, leaving sufficient white space gives a design a feeling of ease and breathability. Don’t jam too much copy on your signs. Be concise – tell your audience who you are and what you want. That’s it.

The color choices you make for your signage have the power to make or break the design. Poor color choices can make a sign down-right illegible. But, smart color choices can make a sign a joy to read and stand out from the crowd.

It’s all about pairing your brand color (or colors) with contrasting colors that will make your sign pop. Always start with your most prominent brand color. From there, check out the color contrast guide included in to see which color combinations are most legible according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

Your signs are one of your most valuable advertising tools. It’s important that they make a strong impression for your brand.