Almost nobody reads your yard sign the way you do. You will look at it on a screen, up close, for as long as you like. The person you are trying to reach sees it through a car window, at an angle, once, while doing something else, for roughly two seconds. Every decision worth making about a yard sign follows from that gap.
We print yard signs at the shop in Sun Valley starting at $19.15 — open houses and listings, construction and remodel sites, campaigns, service trucks staking a sign where they just finished a job, church and school events across the San Fernando Valley. Size and quantity drive the price, and you set both in the configurator. This is what we go through with people before anything hits the press.
Six words, not sixteen
The usual rule of thumb for signage is about one inch of letter height per ten feet of reading distance. On a 24 x 18 sign at the curb, read from a car lane thirty or forty feet away, that puts your main line somewhere around three to four inches tall. Do that arithmetic honestly and you will discover your sign holds one headline, one identifier and one way to get in touch. That is it.
So decide what the sign is for before you lay it out. An open house sign exists to make someone turn at the corner — it needs an arrow and the words OPEN HOUSE, and your brokerage logo is a distant third. A contractor's job-site sign exists to make a neighbor write down a phone number, so the number is the biggest element on the panel and everything else is supporting cast. A sign that tries to do both jobs does neither.
Phone numbers still outperform everything else on a drive-by sign, because a passenger can read one out loud. QR codes work when the reader is standing still — a sign on a fence at a farmers market, a sign next to a door — and are close to useless when the reader is at thirty-five miles an hour. Put a URL on the sign only if it is short enough to be remembered at a stoplight.
Corrugated plastic and which way the flutes run
Yard signs are printed on corrugated plastic: two thin sheets with hollow ribs, called flutes, running between them. Those flutes are the reason the material is light, cheap and stiff, and their direction is the single most common production detail people get wrong.
The wire H-stake works by sliding its two vertical legs inside the flutes. That means the flutes have to run vertically, top to bottom, in the finished sign's orientation. On a standard landscape 24 x 18 sign this is not what you would get by simply cutting the panel the efficient way, so it is something we set deliberately. If your sign is an unusual shape, or it is going on a fence with zip ties rather than in the ground, or it is going into a metal frame, tell us — the right flute direction for a zip-tied sign is not always the right one for a staked sign.
Vertical flutes also keep the panel from sagging over its own width in the heat. A sign with the flutes running the wrong way, left in the sun on Lankershim in August, will start to bow.
The ground here is not soil
This is the part nobody plans for. In a lot of the east Valley, what is under the grass in September is dry hardpan clay or decomposed granite, and a wire stake pushed into that will fold at the crossbar before it goes anywhere. People end up standing on it, bending it, and blaming the stake.
Two fixes, both free. Water the spot — a few minutes with a hose the evening before, or twenty minutes before you place the sign, changes hardpan into something a stake will enter. Or make pilot holes: drive a screwdriver or a length of rebar into the two spots first, then set the stake into them. Either way, put the stake in the ground empty and slide the sign onto it afterward. Pushing on the printed panel is how the flutes get crushed and the sign ends up crooked.
Watch what is under you. Front lawns in this part of the Valley are full of sprinkler laterals and drip line sitting three or four inches down, and a stake leg through an irrigation line turns a cheap sign into an expensive afternoon. In a bark or gravel bed, push through the loose layer into whatever holds beneath it — a stake standing in mulch is a stake standing in nothing.
Wind, and ordering spares
Yard signs lose to wind more often than they lose to anything else, and a Santa Ana condition will take out signs that stood through a whole winter. What matters is sail area and how deep the stake sits. Push the stake all the way down until the crossbar is at grade — a stake left two inches proud has a lever arm, and the wind will use it.
A 24 x 24 sign catches noticeably more wind than a 24 x 18, which is worth knowing if you are placing signs at a corner lot, at a driveway gap, or at the open end of a street where the wind funnels. Printing both sides changes nothing about the sail area, so that is not the trade-off to worry about.
If you are placing a lot of signs, order more than you need. Losing some to wind, sprinklers, street sweeping and people who dislike signs is normal for outdoor work, not a fault in the print. Building a small cushion into the quantity is cheaper than reprinting a short run later.
Double-sided is a traffic question
Printing both sides is not automatically better — it is an answer to how traffic reaches the sign. On a one-way street, or a sign facing a T-intersection where everyone arrives from one direction, the second side is spent money. On a two-way street, or a corner where cars approach from two legs, it roughly doubles the sign's useful life per placement.
The two sides also do not have to match. If the northbound approach is a long straight run and the southbound approach is a tight corner, the long approach can carry more copy than the corner does. And set the sign angled toward the lane it is meant for, not flat and parallel to the street — a sign parallel to traffic is a vertical line to anyone driving past it.
Sun, and how long you need the sign to last
Direct Valley sun does two things to a printed panel: it fades the ink and it chalks the plastic. Reds and magentas go first, then yellows; blacks, deep blues and greens hold on longest. A design built around a hot red background will look different after a summer than a design built around a dark blue one, and that difference is worth knowing at the layout stage rather than at the replacement stage.
So be honest about the horizon. A weekend of open houses, a six-week campaign, and a year-round sign at the front of a job site are three different asks. We will not put a month count on a panel sitting in a specific spot — the sun exposure on a north-facing fence and on a west-facing curb strip are not the same job. Plan by the season, look at your signs periodically, and keep the artwork on file so a reprint is a reorder rather than a redesign.
Where the sign is allowed to stand
Private property, with the owner's permission, is the safe default — a front lawn, a job site, a business's own frontage. The public right-of-way is a different matter: the parkway strip between the sidewalk and the curb, medians, traffic islands, utility poles and freeway fencing are regulated by the city or county you are standing in, and signs placed there get removed. HOAs add their own rules on top. We print the signs; we cannot clear the placement, so check the rules of the specific city before you commit to a route of twenty corners.
When the ground is the wrong place for your sign
A fair number of people asking about yard signs actually want a sign out front, and the stake is just the version they have seen most often.
If your customers are on foot on a commercial street, an A-frame sidewalk sign starts at $94.99 and does what a staked sign cannot: it goes out when you unlock the door, comes in when you close, changes message when the special changes, and needs no hole in the ground. On a sidewalk, it beats a yard sign outright.
For anything indoors — reception walls, suite numbers, the panel behind the counter — acrylic business signs start at $46.76 and read as permanent in a way corrugated plastic never will, because of the material thickness and the shadow it throws off the wall. And for a large flat graphic with real color in it, acrylic printing starts at $90 and gives you saturation and gloss that a matte outdoor panel is not trying to compete with.
If the sign is going on the building rather than in front of it, that is signage and front signs work, and a staked sign is often one piece of a larger outdoor advertising placement rather than the whole plan.
Files
Send vector artwork with the fonts outlined, built at final size, with bleed all round. Keep every critical element well inside the panel, and give the bottom three or four inches extra respect — that band is where grass, a curb, a snow of leaves or a parked car will hide your copy from the exact person you wanted reading it. Nothing important goes down there.
Build in CMYK. Resolution expectations are much lower than print people expect: a photo at 100 to 150 ppi at full sign size is fine for something read from a traffic lane, because nobody is inspecting it from eighteen inches away. For double-sided work, send two clearly labelled files rather than one file with both sides on the same artboard.
Angels Print prints yard signs, sidewalk signs and acrylic signage at 8511 Lankershim Blvd in Sun Valley, for businesses and campaigns across the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles. If your artwork is ready, pick your size and quantity and order online. If you are working out how many signs a route actually needs, whether the second side earns its cost, or whether a staked sign is even the right object for your frontage, call us at (818) 806-9006 or bring the file into the shop and we will work it through with you first.