Storefront window signage: what people see from the sidewalk

Someone walking past looks at your window for two or three seconds. In that time they need to get who you are and what you sell. Hours and offers come later, for the people who stopped. So a good storefront is planned by distance: what reads from across the street, what reads from a couple of steps away, and what only reads next to the door.

Three distances, three messages

1. From across the street: your name and what you do, in two or three words. "Coffee," "Tailoring," "Fresh bread." Big letters, few of them.
2. From your own sidewalk: one message for people walking right past. An offer, a product, an invitation.
3. Next to the door: hours, card payments, a QR code to your menu or website, your phone number. All at eye level.

The most common mistake is putting everything on the glass at the same size. Then nothing reads from anywhere.

How big the letters should be

For road signs, the US standard (the MUTCD) works with roughly 30 feet of legibility distance for every inch of letter height, about 9 meters per 2.5 cm. The calculation assumes 20/40 vision, the minimum most states require for a driver's license.

A shop window isn't a highway, but the rule gives you a quick estimate. If you want your name to read from across a 40-foot street, the letters need to be at least an inch and a half tall, and in practice we make them much bigger, because people aren't staring at your window. For the text by the door, read from about three feet away, a fraction of an inch is plenty; there, contrast matters more than size.

What helps at any distance:

• strong contrast: white on dark glass, black or your brand color on a light background;
• a simple typeface, without hairline strokes or tightly packed letters;
• few words, in normal sentence case rather than all caps.

Don't cover the whole window

A window has two jobs: show what's inside and let light in. Cover it entirely with solid vinyl and people can no longer see the shelves, the tables or the customers inside, which often sell better than any poster. Leave clear areas at eye level.

When you need privacy (a clinic, an office, a salon), you have two options:

• frosted film, which lets light through but hides what's behind it; you can cut your logo or a text band out of it;
• perforated film ("one-way vision"): from outside you see the printed image, from inside you see out through the tiny holes.

Perforated film and evening light

Perforated film works on light: the brighter side is the one you see. During the day it's brighter outside than inside, so the street sees the graphic and you see out. In the evening that flips. The manufacturer Contra Vision says plainly that privacy is often lost when the lighting inside is brighter than outside, and that curtains or blinds are still needed for full privacy.

If you're open into the evening, plan the window for the dark too: a light box, illuminated letters, or at least a well-placed light on the window graphic.

Before production

• Take a photo of your window from straight in front and from the street corner. We draw the graphic over your photo, to scale, so you see it before anything gets printed.
• Measure the glass exactly, frame included.
• Check with your local authority whether storefront signage needs a permit, especially for light boxes and dimensional letters.

You'll find what we make for windows and storefronts on our signage and large format page, and cut vinyl on the stickers page. For indoor signs, we also wrote about signage for offices and shops.