How many fonts do I offer customers??

[Joe McNamara]

Hi Paddy,
I have about 30 on display.
If you show them 350 they’ll sit there all day trying to figure out the best “design” they can come up with ……..
At the end of the day that’s your job mate, I don’t let a builder design his van livery, just like I wouldn’t tell him how to build a house!
Save yourself a lot of grief and just do 2 or 3 designs to show them.
Cheers
Joe

[Kevin.Beck]

I second that.
I show them 1 A4 page with about 20 on it. It still takes them all day to choose.

[Deleted User]

So all of a sudden the customer is a designer eh?

Don’t give them any font choices, just a couple of designs with a different look.

A customer likes to feel they have an input on a design so if they choose one from a couple of designs then they feel they’ve made the choice of how their sign will look.

You are the designer so if your design is good then it will shine and they will go with it.

In 7 years I have NEVER shown a font chart to a customer.

[Tim Shaw]

I am with you guys. I never show the punter font books. It is up to me to offer then a choiceof suitable fonts for the sign, and the signs look.

They always pick the same ‘headline fonts’ anyway like Algerian, and Old English, Cooper or Commercial Script.

Once you have been selected fonts for your own designs for a few months you will soon get a feel for the right ‘kind’ of font for the job.

You will probably get a ‘font of the month’ when a font just seems to fit and suit every sign you, for while. Then you will getr sick of it and never use it again. I havent used STOP and REVUE for years. And I only use Helvetica if I am matching someone elses work?

[Mike Grant]

The art of a good sales pitch is to sell them what YOU want them to have.

Admittedly it does take years to learn which fonts work and which ones don’t, so if the customer insists on changing a font I usually drop my fonts folder on his lap and tell him that there are over 4000 fonts in there and how much time does he have, they usualy take all of 5 seconds to agree with what you have done. 😆

The same goes for colours, If I had a quid for every customer who sat down with me to change the colours I have selected just to go around in a big circle and end up where I started from.

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT, except when he crosses my threshhold. 😆 😆 😆

[J. Hulme]

(?)

All my customers seem to come complete with their design printed stationery equipped!
”It must be exact to that logo / design and font”
I always 👿 ask them what font it is- but not one has ever got it right,
-nowhere near.

I will then spend hours looking through my hard copies or if not got it searching the internet for it

Fussy sods around here 😉

[J. Hulme]

quote paddy:

Dear all,

I suppose I should show them the most vinyl friendly ones which are easy and speedy to weed, but which are they??? only used Arial and Times New Roman so far.

Easy to weed and got to be *readable*
I was behind a little white rascal van on the way back from liverpool today
complete with edge graphics, could you read it from behind, not a chance.

No point in fancy lettering if you can’t read it.

[Pete Witney]

In olden days (PC)a signwriter would have to hand maybe a dozen letter styles,a formal and an informal version of each ,ie.two Romans,two Scripts,Sans Serifs ,Gothics, One Strokes and a couple of his own fancy designs.This is the sort of range I try to show a customer to get a feel for their likes and dislikes and to point out which would be better for Titles, secondry copy etc..I may show them a specific Roman but it doesn’t mean thats what they get it just gives me somewhere to start.

[John Singh]

I’ve found Peters suggestion works well for me

Give them a few quick samples or variations on a theme based on the information they have supplied you.

Thankfully with the duplicate button this is very easily and quickly done so it doesn’t tax your valuable time although it does give the customer the impression you’ve stay up all night working on his designs.

Let them choose from those designs. What normally happens is that they’ll say something like ‘Can I have the telephone number a tad bigger’ You say ‘sure, I’ll sort that out for you’

As the guys have already said: NEVER show them font lists else they will take all day and still be undecided.

As Peter says we’re the designers so don’t load the customer with burden

John

[Kevin.Beck]

I quite agree with what you are saying concerning designs for signs and vehicles.

But I get a lot of customers coming into the shop, asking for DIY kits. Just a couple of lines of text, for them to fit themselves.

They want to see what fonts you have. I don`t sit there, typing in theier text, then changing it to differant fonts.

I just show them the page. And they pick a font. If they ask me to show them on the computer, I tell them I haven`t the time, but if they would like to pay me extra, then i`ll make the time. They soon pick a font.

[Martin Pearson]

Its interesting reading what others do and I think I agree with what Peter has said although I had never thought of it that way before.
We all complain about the customers not being able to make up their mind about styles colours fonts etc, but it is infact quite often us that swamp the customer with options and make it so difficult for them.
I am probably my own worst enemy as I try to give the customer exactly what they want and most of the time they dont really know what they want. I have a board next to the design computer with about sixty different fonts on it and a message at the bottom that says this is only a small selection of fonts available !!
A lot of the time it is fairly easy as the customer will already have business cards with a logo, in these cases we match the font on the business card the best that we can, but for new businesses this is where the problems normally occur.