Traders Need To Lift Their Game – Signage – Special Offer

Price signs are an essential ingredient for most traders and the quality of your product can be influenced by the quality of your signs. Finding time to create professional signs at the market can be a problem but we’ve found a way to do it on your smartphone and we have a special offer that will enable you to print some signs for free.

Communicating effectively with your customers and showing the right level of professionalism is important as we compete with other retailers both in stores and online. Signs can range from a professionally printed and laminated, well organised, attractively coloured, and clearly visible piece of work to a hastily written, poorly executed, dog-eared, piece of leftover box flap that really should have stayed in the rubbish bin. Fortunately the top standard can be created with very little work. In fact, as we have suggested, you can start the design process on your mobile phone.

Hand writing your signs is quick and easy but, unless you have sign-writing or calligraphy skills, don’t kid yourself, hand written signs look amateurish, and devalue your product. This is the digital age and digital skills are easy to come by.

Designing a digital sign doesn’t require a lot of expertise. Most word processors like Word enable you to select a dollar sign and a price and then simply increase the size of the font to give you a price sign of the required size. Change the colour of the letters and numbers (usually to red) and print out the file. Bingo! – there is your sign. For a bit more sophistication you may have software like Corel Draw or one of the Adobe software products. Experimenting with the type of paper or card you use, and the fonts you use will help improve your result.

Don’t have a reliable printer? Well, take your file to an Officeworks store and use their publishing facilities. It is just like printing photos from a camera. And a big advantage of digital signs is that you don’t have to go through the creative process when the signs get torn and tatty. Just reprint the file.

If you have an iPhone then we have another really convenient way of creating signs and a special offer for traders that will allow you to create some signs for free. Download an app from the Apple Store called Misigns. Misigns has a free basic version which is fine for experimenting. Simply follow the apps instructions to design your sign and then use the email option to send it to generalmerchandisetraders@iinet.net.au We will print up to 4 signs for your stall and deliver them to you at the market next Saturday. If you already have a printer you can email the sign to yourself, but either way feel free to try out the system. Your signs will be printed on 200gsm A4 size (standard letter size) card. If you want smaller signs, please let us know how many signs you want on an A4 page. So, for standard 6*4 photo size signs, ask for 4 signs on a page. Don’t forget to give us your Saturday stall location in the email and perhaps a contact phone number would be handy.

The Misigns app doesn’t have a lot of flexibility. There is only one size font although you can select upper or lower case and you can select the colour of your lettering. Its killer feature is that you can easily design professional looking signs on your phone, at the market, and then just print them out when convenient. No doubt there will be traders with a wealth of experience in ways to create and print signs for their stall. We'd love to hear from you.

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