Sign Law & Policy

The letter to the editor of The New York Times certainly caught my attention. The writer, a respected chief executive of a national trade association, started, “Our industry agrees … are serious challenges facing our nation.”

I closed my eyes and imagined the missing words, “Our industry agrees that visual clutter and poorly designed and manufactured signs are serious challenges facing our nation.” Now that’s exactly what is required to start a new national conversation about signs!

Then I opened my eyes and found, instead, the words of Susan K. Neely, CEO of the American Beverage Association, agreeing that “obesity and the need to improve health care in America are serious challenges facing our nation.” I only can hope that Neely’s strategy can inspire equally frank remarks from the on-premise sign industry.

STILL THE QUESTION, WHO SPEAKS FOR THE SIGN INDUSTRY?
When I began this column in January 2008, I asked the question, “Who speaks for the sign industry?” The question is as appropriate now as ever.

This portion of Beechmont Avenue in Cincinnati, shown to Sign & Digital Graphics readers 18 months ago, will be the focus of a re-visioning project by University of Cincinnati planning students and presented at the October Signage Foundation, Inc./UC signage conference.

The controversial proposed sign code changes in Los Angeles provide a good example. There, the California Sign Association – on behalf of its members – spoke against certain draconian aspects of the proposal. Fair enough, yet the CSA membership roster is filled with quality sign companies that understand every detail of designing, manufacturing, installing and maintaining effective on-premise signs.

Would the CSA want to represent all sign companies in Los Angeles or California? I rather doubt it. Below-radar companies made and installed the thousands of illegal signs causing part of the Los Angeles ruckus. In California and many other states, sign associations legitimately are wary of unlicensed manufacturing and installation.

Across communities, citizen planning board members, as well as professional planners, there is despair of ill-designed and poorly made and maintained signs. For starters, let’s quit pretending that we should have any deep interest in representing such companies. As a group, they do far more damage to our interests as an industry than any theoretical benefits accruing to a trade group wanting to claim them and their numbers for other purposes.

Some readers may argue (and I hope you do) that it is the educational programs of a trade association ultimately that will reform the poor performers I have described. That may be, but let’s keep their probationary status active for a while longer.

TIME FOR A MORE PRODUCTIVE DIALOGUE WITH PLANNERS
If, and this is a big if, the on-premise sign industry can begin to acknowledge that visual clutter exists in many communities and costs everyone, I believe a new and more productive dialogue with planners and citizen boards could start.

This dialogue would center on three issues: clutter, capitalism and community. To the issue of visual clutter, much is obvious – it happens one sign at a time with almost all legally permitted. Over time, a streetscape erodes. Inevitably, the demand grows for a revised sign code to get things back under control. Then we are off to the races with sides dueling to reach victory.

It seems sides always are taken in the tension between capitalism and community. Businesses want unfettered development of private property. Planners want that same property subject to land use controls.

But I see room to embrace both ideals. No community can prosper for long without having a base of growing businesses – businesses, which by the way, pay taxes, including the salaries of city planners. Yet no business can reach its full potential to earn profits if it serves a blighted, deteriorating city.

This is not an either/or: either my property or your community. We can hold dear both concepts at one time – capitalism and community. Adding visual value to a community is the most straightforward way for our industry to fulfill its own capitalist designs.

FIRST NATIONAL SIGNAGE CONFERENCE COMING
The added good news is help is on the way. In Cincinnati, Oct. 13 to 15, is the first National Signage Research and Education Conference sponsored by the Signage Foundation, Inc. in collaboration with the College of Business and the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati.

SFI, as readers of this column recall, also sponsored the model sign code, authored by attorney Alan Weinstein and Cleveland planner David Hartt. They will give a presentation on the model code during the October conference, one of many sessions targeted to planners, government officials, marketing and brand professionals, appraisers, and UC faculty and students.

On-premise sign companies are welcome, and I encourage their attendance. For full program and registration details, visit www.thesignagefoundation.org.

The one session I am most looking forward to will be given by UC planning professor Menelaos Triantafillou. In my inaugural January 2008 column, I showed a photograph of a typical streetscape that easily would invoke the charge of “visual clutter” (see photo in this column). It was taken on a portion of a street called Beechmont Avenue in the eastern part of Cincinnati.

I must have been prescient because this very same stretch of streetscape will be the subject of a summer-length “studio project” by UC planning students under the guidance of Professor Triantafillou. The students will study each and every sign in the corridor. Then, using the Weinstein/Hartt model sign code, they will begin to integrate its instruction into a re-visioning of this too-typical commercial corridor.

My July column showcased such a streetscape re-visioning sequence in pictures and renderings, as prepared by the California Sign Association. Later this year, this commendable UC planning experiment will become public. And through the process of that project, young planning students will begin to see the relationship between clutter, capitalism and community.