This fall, the National Signage Research & Education Conference (NSREC) will devote several new sessions to regulations, which are among the most frequently recurring issues affecting the on-premise sign industry.
Wendy Moeller, owner of Compass Point Planning, will discuss the main points in a newly developed community guide to the regulation of temporary signs, based on research sponsored by the Signage Foundation. As Moeller explains, communities often struggle to find a balance when considering new regulations that will apply to signs, but fail to find any helpful resources establishing ‘best practices’ for these provisions. The guide is designed to fill this gap.
Marketing professor Charles R. Taylor, meanwhile, will explore the economic impact of illuminated sign restrictions on business success. By surveying owners of hundreds of businesses, he has seen how the ability to display an illuminated sign has helped many of them remain viable.
James J. Kellaris, chair of signage and visual marketing for the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Business, will update earlier research of how shoppers are influenced by signage with new insight into what consumers think about sign regulations.
University educators Alan C. Weinstein, Eric Strauss and Dawn Jourdan will detail how they have reassessed the importance of sign law and subsequently integrated sign regulation into the planning-law courses in their graduate programs.
Finally, Pat Crawford, an associate professor of landscape architecture, will present a study examining the impact of both traditional and ‘form-based’ on-premise signage codes on streetscapes and evaluating stakeholders’ perceptions of these types of codes. The goal is to enable the development of improved next-generation sign codes.
The 2014 edition of NSREC will also include sessions about lighting levels for electronic message centres (EMCs), strategies for sign design and integration and tools for analyzing the context of signs within urban and suburban streetscapes. The conference will take place on October 8 and 9 at the Kingsgate Marriott in Cincinnati, Ohio, sponsored by the Signage Foundation and the UC Colleges of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning (DAAP) and Business.
