Small shops foster big-brand mindset

by carly_mchugh | 6 December 2023 11:21 am

By Clinton Clarke

This is a short story—a microscopic look, perhaps—regarding how a small design firm works with sign companies. Our clients’ needs for design, branding, and marketing often cross paths with requiring creative and cost-effective signage solutions and, ultimately, final fabrication.

We are a married team of two running Barking Pixel Design, a boutique design communications studio in Peterborough, Ont. We prefer to work mainly with small to medium-sized businesses, but we treat our projects with big-brand mentality and methodology. We keep our clients’ goals and objectives at the forefront, creating original concepts for a wide variety of design and marketing challenges.

When we graduated from our graphic design programs—Kerry from Durham College in Oshawa, Ont., in 1999, and me from St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ont., in 1996—we had little idea of how involved we would become in signage design and its various applications more than 25 years later.

Below is a snapshot of how we have worked with some trusted sign companies over the years.

Building and maintaining industry relationships

After many years working in a digital and print environment, we started taking on full “rebrand” projects, which typically involve updating or developing a client’s logomark, website, and marketing collateral. As our business has grown, this package has evolved to include vehicle signage, wayfinding, and storefront/custom signage.

In the Peterborough and the Kawarthas region, about 100 km (62.1 mi) east of Toronto, there are a number of local sign companies. Many of our clients would often have existing relationships with signage suppliers who did work for them in the past, but when it came time to requiring new signage as part of their rebrand efforts, a number of the shops did not have the marketing or design experience to bring a proper creative vision to life. This is usually why a new client would reach out to us for help.

As a result, we have aligned ourselves with reliable suppliers to help us with fabrication, who understand our efforts and why the work we do as a graphic design company is so important to our clients’ marketing investments. These companies take pride in their craft, like to collaborate closely with designers, and offer some form of trade discount to compensate for project management and bringing them the work.

We have relied on a variety of shops over many years. All of them have individual capabilities and specialties to accomplish different types of fabrication.

For vehicle wraps and any kind of cut vinyl graphic, we almost exclusively work with AGL Graphics and Signs, who have been operating in Peterborough for more than 30 years. They produce great results that last, and we work hand-in-hand with them, providing client-approved, colour-accurate design proofs which they use as their guide for installs. We deliver resolution-ready, scaled production files (typically at 100 dots per inch [dpi]), which are then printed and installed by their graphics production team.

In the last couple of years, we have also started working with PrintHub, which has grown substantially in Peterborough. They produce just about anything for print and signage. The capabilities of the company continue to grow, and the sales and production staff are dedicated to their customers and trade clients, with quick turnaround. We no longer have to seek out trade suppliers in Toronto to produce certain types of printing and signage—such as SwissQ and computer numerical control (CNC) capabilities for Alupanel and Coroplast signage—which avoids extra shipping costs. Printing direct-to-substrate has been amazing, as vinyl applications, when applied directly, tend to weather after a number of years. We recently completed a large wayfinding and signage project for a trailer and cottage resort in Buckhorn, Ont., which involved about 200 pieces. PrintHub produced these for us, and the client was able to install them with our guidance.

Since we work with print projects almost daily, we often rely on Trent University’s Campus Print to produce many items for our clients, including short-run digital prints, stickers, brochures, envelopes, banner stands, smaller signage, posters, and promotional items that can be laser-etched, as they have a Glowforge in their shop. The team is great to work with and their turnaround is always quick. They run a couple of Epson and Roland large-format inkjets, as well as a number of Xerox Production Series printers in their shop, which help them achieve accurate colours. They also do bindery, stitching, folding, and trimming, which is great for many of our short-run needs.

However, our longest relationship with a sign company—spanning almost 15 years—has been with The Media Works, of Norwood, Ont., just 20 minutes east of Peterborough. A custom-build shop with a long family history of signmaking, they have specialized in pylon signs, awning builds, channel lettering, and fascia signage, as well as many other unique projects, for more than 50 years. They also offer support for other sign companies, including custom builds, LED retrofits, repairs, installation, and maintenance throughout central and eastern Ontario. They have been of great support for our design firm, as they help with some of the more technical acumen we lack, along with permit drawing requirements. They take care of the permitting issues for projects—which can sometimes be complicated—and turn our vision and ideas into reality for our clients, which is for sure a win-win.

Concerning trends in signage and design

Over the last 10 years or so, we have noticed a steep trend in mostly smaller sign shops and design studios overusing stock art elements, while offering “branding” or “logo creation” as part of their services alongside signage applications. This partially has to do with how graphic assets are so easily available online through websites such as FreePik, iStock, or Unsplash, and are now being used exclusively with no original creation to meet clients’ marketing objectives.

This is a dangerous trend—as well as a sign of the times, where budgets are limited—but it is also a major disservice to clients’ business objectives when not using professional design and marketing services to create original art for signage or logomarks, or at a minimum, modifying the found stock art. For example, a real estate agent or homebuilder will realize the same house roof graphic has been used for another business just down the street, which has happened on multiple occasions. Further, artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up an entirely new set of challenges (or perhaps possibilities, depending on how you look at it).

As a design studio, we do occasionally rely on stock resources for idea-gathering or to help formulate concepts, but we would never resort to using stock art off-the-shelf to call our own or hand off as new to a client. In many cases, stock resources being used verbatim to cater to the need of a quick, profitable sale and production often results in lackluster projects, and we have seen and had many new clients come to us to fix these problems.  

This is not to say all sign shops operate this way. Obviously, some larger shops within larger cities have graphic designers and marketers on staff, who draft detailed, comprehensive options for their clients’ signage needs. What tends to set us apart—and the reason why clients end up working with us to develop new signage or storefront designs—is we go the extra mile to fine-tune important subtle design details or concepts, such as colour decisions, typography, and layout element ratios; offer marketing and design rationale of the executions; and often assist with the final finessing of the written messaging.

After researching many shops and their public postings over the years, either via their website, Facebook, or Instagram, it now seems prevalent for small and mid-sized shops to churn out as much as they can, as quickly as they can. We hope this will change.

In awe of the possibilities

Today’s sign industry has so much to offer its clients, and our word of advice would be to encourage design companies to build signage into their business offerings. It never ceases to amaze us just how much potential there is now when it comes to the various types of creative signage solutions and materials that exist today, compared to even 20 years ago. Although we are a small design studio, and many of our jobs are relatively simple in nature, our clients are always surprised and very grateful for the extra detail and effort we put into the projects—mainly due to our graphic design experience, knowledge, and capabilities. We make our projects feel unique, personal, and polished.

As our business continues to grow, we will keep offering signage solutions as part of our core services. Working together effectively with our suppliers, and often as the silent salesperson on their behalf to effectively secure new sign projects, is a great dynamic that benefits each other’s businesses.   

Clinton Clarke is the co-owner and operator of Barking Pixel Design, a boutique design communications studio in Peterborough, Ont. The company works with various local sign shops to serve clients in the Peterborough and the Kawarthas region.

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/small-shops-foster-big-brand-mindset/

---