A sig­nage designer is not only using the com­puter as cen­ter of the uni­verse but uses dif­fer­ent kind of tools to com­plete the (design) job. In this arti­cle I’ve com­piled a list of most impor­tant tools that I use to design, cre­ate and pro­duce sig­nage, wayfind­ing and other related design products.

Top 10 of most impor­tant tools

1. The Fun­da­men­tals of Typog­ra­phy — A great book full of exam­ples about design­ing with type.
2. Stan­ley Tape Rule — Made of steel, one of the most impor­tant hand tools I use to quickly mea­sure something.
3. Stain­less steel ruler — Excel­lent for mea­sur­ing nar­row size items, exact to the millimeter.
4. Steel caliper — To mea­sure the dis­tance between two sym­met­ri­cally oppos­ing sides and to mea­sure the thick­ness of materials.
5. AcrySign color sam­ples — Mate­r­ial color may dif­fer from stan­dard color sys­tems like Pan­tone, there­fore I use a sam­ple chain to check the color.
6. PANTONE Color Bridge Coated — Pan­tone Color Match­ing Sys­tem (PMS) is the worlds stan­dard color usage sys­tem, can’t live with­out it. Most design stu­dios (graphic) work with PMS.
7. Sikkens RAL — A color sys­tem mainly used used for paint col­ors. On of the most pop­u­lar color is RAL 9010 (white).
8. Black per­ma­nent Fine­liner — Using it all day for writ­ing, design­ing, quick sck­etches and more. Using dozens of them.
9. Srew­driver — The small srew­driver rep­re­sents a vari­ety of machin­ery used to develop & cre­ate sig­nage systems.
10. Cal­cu­la­tor — To use for design cal­cu­la­tions, math­e­matic rela­tions, finance and more.

More items on the list

To com­plete the man­u­fac­tur­ing part at the com­pany we use var­i­ous machin­ery like: Vinyl cut­ter & plot­ter, laser engrav­ing, laser cut­ting and CNC engrav­ing machin­ery. The design ele­ments are devel­oped with the Adobe Design Suite CS3, we espe­cially work with Adobe Illus­tra­tor which is the prob­a­bly best pro­fes­sional draw­ing pro­gram (in my opin­ion) for cre­at­ing vec­tor based design & sig­nage sys­tems. Other pro­grams like Auto­cad and spe­cific engrav­ing soft­ware are used to man­u­fac­ture the prod­ucts. We make use of 3rd par­ties for paint­ing jobs and cre­at­ing metal structures.

Some sig­nage examples

Land­mark Sig­nage with the logo Boutercheese cut­ted in 8 mm Acrysign and painted in dif­fer­ent PMS colors.

Bronze engraved name­plate for Heineken Head­of­fice in Amsterdam.

Vinyl cut­ted self­ad­he­sive foil, cut­ted in a blue­print pat­tern of large cities around the world for Tom­Tom Head­of­fice Amsterdam.

Boxed LED sig­nage for IDEXX, a lab­o­ra­tory test­ing com­pany in the Netherlands.

Share your tools and creations

Thank you Katy for the inspi­ra­tion idea: “What’s in My Purse?”

So.. tell me! — I’m inter­ested to know the tools you use to com­plete your (design) job.