OutTakes
by Edd Merritt,
May 6, 2010, page 17.....

It’s Sign Language of a Different Sort

Gad, the human mind is a weird object. I know no more what triggers my thoughts than my 3 –year-old grand kids know what holds them to Earth – physically, that is, because they’re often not in my cosmos mentally. Their minds ramble through space at a speed that would make Han Solo jealous.
Anyway, this week’s triggered thought has to do with messages and what you want your audience to see and do with them.
The question popped into my head when I reached the four-way stop at the intersection of Hinesburg and Mount Philo Roads in East Charlotte. It’s a good intersection for traffic in all directions and an ideal place to stick a sign announcing everything from the local chicken pie supper to the fresh veggie sale down the road.
But my question isn’t why, rather it’s how? If you want a traveler to read and comprehend a message, why not make it big and bold?
What prompted this thought recently is the fact that it took me several trips past a particular sign that I know was put up to catch my attention and tell me Green Up Day was on the horizon.
I don’t think it’s simply my 67-year-old eyesight. I think many sign posters don’t consider what they are trying to do with a particular notice, who it is directed toward, and how they can best reach that audience. It’s easy to get caught up in the message itself, and it happens whether it’s posting yard sales, get-out-the-vote reminders, sheep manure or wedding receptions.
Oh, all right, so I’m a journalist and touchy about language and clarity and color and size of words and expectations about secondary texts and all that folderol that goes along with getting messages across (Maybe I’d have more fun just trying to be clever.).
It took me back to my advertising days when my boss laid out to us the importance of the headline. He said that headlines were what grabbed or lost the reader – not the text in the body of the ad. The details all came later. If the headline didn’t catch readers’ attention in a second, the rest of the ad was sheer waste that could have been better used, as John Rosenthal notes, to wrap dead fish.
I went ‘round and ‘round’ this thesis with a number of artists in our agency who seemed more bent on creativity than purpose. And as a result, some really creative designs were washed down the old rat hole; although their makers actually went on to become quite famous in their own rights, they simply bombed as advertisers.
Well, I believe the Green Up Day folks could benefit a bit from my old boss’s advice. Their signs along the roads in Charlotte left me peering for meaning. I had difficulty reading the headline even up close. I think the bottom half of each sign contained the names of the companies sponsoring the day, but I couldn’t decipher them either.
I must admit that growing up along the vast straight roads of the Upper Midwest gave me plenty of time to contemplate miles of signage from southern Minnesota to the Badlands of South Dakota. I knew Burma Shave in and out. Wall Drug Store ads began 300 miles east of the store’s location and ended with an admonition that if you’d driven through Wall and not stopped, well, you better turn around and go back. I listened to Muddy Waters sing the praises of White Rose Petroleum Jelly at night and saw the signs for Mullin’s Pig Starter on the way to football games in Mankato.
Let the neurobiologists figure out how this all affected my brain cells, but I do believe that it impacted my perspective on human communication – its purpose and method.
Green Up is an event to be preserved and celebrated. Let’s announce it with a tuba, not a tin whistle. If you want a traveler to catch your message, think large, think simple, think bold.
As Green Up Day approaches next year I want to drive up the hill toward Mt. Philo Road and be confronted with a series of short statements that I can read easily, maybe that say:

“HEY NEIGHBORS!

IT’S GREEN UP DAY

GRAB THOSE BAGS

PUT YOUR CELLPHONES AWAY!

BURMA SHAVE”

I’ll gladly plant them.