5 Easy Steps to Stunning Hoarding Designs

The city streets, parks, roads, and highways create this magnificent canvas for you to paint your advertising message on. There are plenty of outdoor advertising opportunities out there. But there are only a few ways to efficiently communicate your message to drivers, vehicle passengers, and pedestrians. The trick is to discover these efficient ways and implement them in your design.

If you succeed, you will achieve the standards of what we call a stunning hoarding design. While creating such designs might sound challenging, it isn’t. To help you out, we have created a list of 5 easy steps to stunning hoarding designs.

Brand Image and Target Market as Stunning Hoarding Design Essentials

Let’s start with your target market first and see why cross-referencing it with your brand image is essential. As a designer, you probably know how important it is to design for the audience. To do so, you need to know what the audience needs, what challenges they are facing, and what type of visual stimuli they react to the best.

Stunning hoarding designs have to be backed up with market research data if you want to see real results. But why cross-reference it with your brand image then? Not all the imagery and graphics that potential customers prefer are in line with your branding efforts.

To achieve consistency through all marketing channels, you have to choose the imagery and graphics that both attract potential customers but also represent your brand. This will also help you narrow down your options and make it easier to decide where to take the design.

Visit the Hoarding Site

Ok, now that you know which imagery and graphics you can use, it is time to pack your sketchbook and head outside. A site survey is nothing unusual in this line of business. To be able to design stunning hoarding, you will have to see where the billboards will be installed. This is a vital part of the design process and a standard procedure found in hoarding design services offered by professionals.

This step removes two common pitfalls hoarding designers face. One is to end up with a design that looks ridiculous and messy in the surroundings, and the other is to design something that surroundings swallow and render unnoticeable.

Stunning hoarding designs complement the surroundings and pop out from to communicate the target message. While outside, consider the gradients and permanent elements you plan to use. Make a few quick sketches by taking real measurements, nearby signs, structures, trees, and bushes.

Consider Restrictions and Keep the Message Simple

After the first two steps, you have some actionable insights and elements to work with. Now is the time to consider the restrictions and how will they affect your design. What are the limits we are talking about? Both printing and display have their requirements. Meeting them is only achievable by taking restrictions into account.

A stunning hoarding design is a flexible design. This means that your deliverables can easily translate physically and digitally. After all, billboards are some of the largest printed formats out there. A go-to choice for most designers is vector files, as they correctly scale without any quality loss.

Due to these restrictions and the nature of outdoor hoarding, you will have to choose the means to communicate the marketing message carefully. The basic elements of every hoarding design include:

Image(s)
Company logo
White space
Call to action
Key contact information

All of these make the marketing message with the company logo, extending your brand identity in the entire design.

Now is a perfect time to use those sketches you made and give them a second look. Consider several layouts, play with the position of images, the configuration of whitespace, and the logo position. Discover the most efficient composition in terms of grabbing the viewer’s attention and communicating the message.

Don’t forget that viewers will have limited viewing time on your ad. The message should be short and sweet so that every driver can effortlessly read and comprehend it. It is not a coincidence that most of the billboards you see out their feature messages containing no more than only a couple of words.

Create Several Design Prototypes

Welcome to the fourth step. You are just one step away from finalizing your stunning hoarding design. At this point, you have everything you need to sit down and create several design prototypes. You’ve learned a great deal about your client’s branding identity and cross-referenced it against the target audience’s needs and wants.

You’ve also visited the site and learned the composition of the surroundings and thought about restrictions. Your next step is to sit down, open your favorite software, and start playing with the design mentioned above elements. Leverage white space and images to make the message prominent. Try out different layouts, colors, fonts, but remember to stay inside the boundaries set by your client’s brand image.

Whether you send your work to your client or you meet for a presentation, stay open for advice and remarks. After all, your clients hire you to help them get what they need. You can go as far as making a suggestion; the final decision is in their domain.

Be Loud and Colorful

Armed with your client’s insights, you are ready to bring your work to an end. You know what you are after. Now, it is time to make your hoarding design stunning. Don’t be afraid to go loud and colorful. Your design has to attract the attention of people who only have a few seconds to spare to look at it.

Make sure that the text is optimized for the best readability. Play with contrasting colors to deliver the attention-grabbing impact and make it easier for drivers to remember the message. The best way to do it is to keep the background simple or leave a lot of white space. Simple backgrounds are not fighting for attention, which leaves a lot of room for your message and feature image to be prominent.

Creating stunning hoarding designs is a process. For every client, this process is going to be unique, which makes it time and energy-consuming. Fortunately, some businesses specialize in exclusively providing hoarding design services. Getting professionally designed billboards is the best way to ensure that your message will be heard wherever that billboard gets placed.