kudos to you, signmakers

At my previous job, we had one of those signs with the letters you move around, and it was high enough that we had one of those suction cup poles to get the letters on and off. I’ve thought of that sign a lot recently, since I drive by a lot of similar signs, and one caught my eye that seemed to be using a modified ‘W’ to stand in for an ‘N.’ (It sort of worked!)

Ah, what memories it brought back! Not only do you have to pick a message that fits within the allotted space (ours could fit 20 characters per line, unless it was one of the big letters, and then slightly less), but you also had to fit the seemingly arbitrary limits of your letter set.

For instance, anytime we had to change the message on our sign, we had to follow these guidelines:

*No punctuation. (We had a dollar sign, but no question mark. Forget about commas and periods.)

*Absolutely no more than 6 of the letter ‘S.’ (Four would be better — we had four that came with the set, and then two more we faked up that looked a little sad but would do in a pinch.)

*If possible, no letter ‘I’s. The ‘I’ was so narrow that it was incredibly difficult to get the suction cup thing to grab it and get it up to the sign. (And once you did, it tended to fall over when you tried to get the suction cup to release. Just trouble in every way.)

So any time you pass one of those signs and think ‘it looks like they just turned a W upside down and used it as an M,’ you are probably right. And to all of the signmakers out there, kudos to you for making it work!

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.