Last month, I wrote about the virtues of keeping your large-format banners legible by making your message short and sweet. After all, our Three Second Rule states that if you can't visually pique the interest of your audience within three seconds, you lost the sale. Still, even with a power-packed short message on your graphic, it won't do a bit of good if your text is too small to read.

Tip 2: Size your text correctly. Keep fonts large enough to be legible.

Most large-format graphics are glimpsed at from a distance, behind the wheel of a car, or even in the peripheral vision of sidewalk pedestrians. In some cases, the Three Second Rule is stretching it. More often than not, given people’s frantic lives, if text can’t be read easily, your audience won’t even bother trying. So, why would anyone make their graphics more difficult to read? Believe it or not, some people inadvertently do, especially by making their fonts too small. This simple calculation will help you size your fonts correctly:

• Height of text (in inches) = 0.035 x Distance (in feet)
• Point size of text = 72 x Height of text (in inches)

So, if you know your text is going to be seen from 20 feet away, such as across a walkway to a storefront window, then you’d do well to make your smallest text at least 0.7 inch tall, or a point size of 50.4. We've already done some of the thinkwork and rustled up a bunch of standard distances, listed below:

Distance	Text height	Point size
15’	0.525”	37.8pt
15’	0.525"	37.8 pt.
20’	0.7”	50.4 pt.
30’	1.05”	75.6 pt.
50’	1.75”	126 pt.
100’	3.5”	252 pt.
500’	17.5”	1,260 pt.
1,000’	35”	2,520 pt.

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Tags: large format, design, typography, ben lawless, fonts, text, 7 steps