Starbucks, while once having just one location (imagine!) now uses marketing tools vastly more comprehensive than just signage.

Contrary to Starbucks, Marfay Auto Parts is much more dependent on its sign to convey its message.

Sign Law & Policy

Mark A. Olinger, the director of the economic development department in Madison, Wis., gave a presentation recently on sign codes. As a professional planner, he had a lot of practical experience to bear on the topic of how signs and urban design help define a community.

Olinger ended his presentation with what he called the “Third Law of Urban Dynamism.”  Simply stated, he said in his experience there is an inverse relationship between the mere size of a sign, and the demographics of the neighborhood where that sign is sited.

There is a lot hidden in that law. I don’t necessarily disagree with the mere statement that urban “design” looks a lot different in less affluent neighborhoods than in those communities in the higher echelon of median income. So let’s put “Olinger’s Third Law” into motion.

WHEN A SIGN BECOMES AN ICON

The two pictures in my column this month are from properties located less than half a mile from each other. The first is the “small” sign in front of the Starbucks in Mariemont, Ohio, a historic planned community just outside the Cincinnati city limits. The Starbucks sign has reached nearly iconic status. Remove the “Starbucks” and “Coffee” from the sign, simply using the green outer band and the design in the inner circle, and many customers would not miss a beat finding their daily latte.

Consider then the second sign for a near-by Cincinnati business called Marfay Auto Parts. But you knew that instantly, didn’t you? Also this is a location that handles UPS parcels. But you knew that instantly, too, didn’t you? Thus, the business identification needs of the Marfay enterprise have been addressed just as well as the needs of Starbucks. Right?

But I guess Marfay Auto Parts gets swept up into Olinger’s Third Law. Its neighborhood has more wear and tear, the kind found in hundreds of older urban areas in the U.S. Granted, the building façade might not win an architectural award, but its customers and prospects see those letters and know they have arrived where they wanted to be. And isn’t that the most basic definition of a sign?

The lesson I want to take from this tale of two signs, illustrating that “Third Law of Urban Dynamism,” is that we may be giving our attention to the wrong subject. Starbucks, while once having just one location (imagine!) now uses marketing tools vastly more comprehensive than just signage.

And so, too, do other national retailers. While a Home Depot or Costco periodically encounters a tough permitting situation, the on-premise signs deployed are assumed to be made with quality materials and meet all code requirements. In a non-recession year, we count new store openings from these national marketers in the thousands.

Yet what happens with the vastly larger population of local and small businesses, both start-ups and established? Do they get the same design and manufacturing skill from the sign industry as the national accounts? I think the answer is no, and that needs to change.

This division between national marketers and small local businesses has surfaced in other examples, too. The University of Cincinnati planning students, whose signage project I described in a previous column, encountered the issue in evaluating multiple tenant signs. If each tenant hypothetically under its lease gets the same sign area, does a Panera Bread panel and one for “Mediterranean Restaurant” really give equal advertising to each tenant? Maybe, maybe not.

IT’S WHAT THEY COULD AFFORD

Once in this strip shopping center, though, a Panera customer walks into a finely tuned store environment, with on-premise signage readily identified whether sited in Buffalo or Anaheim. The other restaurant, though, if typical, has some vinyl lettering on a window and possibly a digitally-printed poster at the entrance. You’re thinking, well, that restaurant can’t afford anything more!

But can a community, be it Madison, Wis., or Utica, Ill., afford for only the Panera store to succeed—based on our commonly held belief that good graphics make for prosperous businesses? The local restaurant may have the same number of employees, and nearly the same revenue subject to local taxes. Why discriminate, then, against the local business?

What I mean by discriminate is what I think could be implied in Olinger’s Third Law: We (planners) want successful businesses in better neighborhoods, with their small signs, because we like small signs. And by extension, I guess, businesses in the very “best” neighborhoods need no signs at all.

A planner stood up a year ago at an American Planning Association seminar on sign regulation and stated that no signs are really needed, just have numbers on the buildings and people can use their GPS to find their intended location. (This really happened; I can’t make this stuff up.) Lost in that viewpoint, however, is the stark realization that not every consumer has GPS. What about the estimated 14 percent of Americans who are functionally illiterate? What about the obvious need for a second language on signs in ethnic neighborhoods?

DON’T GIVE UP ON THE ‘LITTLE GUY’

In short, we have lots of work to do as an industry. Those national marketers got to that status on the economic ladder in part by exploiting the power of effective signs and graphics. They don’t need a lot of extra persuasion to buy on-premise signs at this point.

The businesses that need our best efforts, our skill and talent, are those local, small enterprises that feed the vitality of a place, that add to the tax base proportionally, that create jobs, that keep sign companies busy.

If we give up on the proverbial little guy—and by “we,” I include planners—we give up on a new generation of successful businesses. And by the way, in doing so, we give up on our own industry, which is primarily made up of small and once-small companies. Let’s allow those small neighborhood businesses and their “big” signs to flourish. We all will profit and grow.