I will try to explain my concepts for making signs. If it's been described before, well then, I'm just not as smart as I think I am. I'm lazy. Making stencils, buying spray paint, it all seems too expensive and too much work, though mine has varying levels of work and planning depending how complex you want to get. 1. Use foam board. Cheap, light, easy to work, not floppy. 2. You'll use your imagination, your computer, and the usual craft tools: scissors, tape, paste, razor blades, straightedge. 3. I'll start with a small sign, 8.5"x11". It sounds small, but it has advantages. Easy to carry, easy to carry several. Easy to handle, fewer wind issues. Signs can be upscaled too... 4. Fire up the 'puter, you'll be using WORD and in WORD, the little tool called WORD ART. It is very simple and you certainly should be able to figure it out in just a very few minutes. I like to use the basic 'outline' word style, and for this sign I'm just using Arial font. Your letters will be drawn as outline, not a solid color. The width of the line is adjustable, and you can also set the color of the line, and also the fill. This is a double sided sign, so my setup will be landscape page, red line, light blue fill, side one, light blue line, red fill, side two. Set the 'justification' to center, the font size to 96 Bold, and type XENU. Your word should be on the page in a dotted box that you can move and stretch. Fit it to the page size as you like, bigger is better. That's side one, save and print the file. 5. Same setup for side 2, except as noted above, swap the colors. That red/blue combo really pops, very high-viz. Now type GOOGLE, then on the second line, IT, so 'google' is above 'it'. Save, print. 6. Mount each page on your foam board the best way for you...double side tape, paste sticks, etc. 7. Protest. The small signs are good for curb walking and showing to people in cars close up, sort of....I want YOU to look at this sign..., just keep flipping both sides. 8. Eat delishus caek. You can do pretty cool stuff this way. Look around WORD for clip art, hell, look on the web. You can scale these signs too, you don't need to put the whole sign on one sheet, you can put part of a word, or to make a really big sign, just one letter. If you start breaking things up that way you need to watch the size and shape of each page/element, because things can come out different sizes aNd LooK LIke ThiS. If you need to make proof sheets, be sure to change your printer settings to draft quality/black ink only so you don't waste lots of color ink on garbage. Play with color combinations, fonts, WordArt styles. The results from using this method can produce some very snappy looking signs. Here's a couple I did, the phony vet, and brain/toast...
I had an inspiration for small signs last night. If you have ideas for a number small ones like this, you don't have to make foam core for each one, you can have one core that allows you to change the message on it. All you need is a couple plastic page protectors like this. Fasten it securely to the foam core with double side tape or contact cement and you can slip in whatever sign you want at the moment. Bringing a number of signs with you to a raid is then as easy as having one core and a manila folder with your signs in your bag or pack. You also have less chance of drawing attention to yourself going to or from the protest, no big signs to lug around.
The best signs are written very large and bold using high contrast colors so that you can actually read them from across the street or from the cars. An 8.5 x 11 sign isn't going to be big enough for that.
Understood, and I am not suggesting that small signs should be the norm, but I do think they have their place. I tend to focus on individuals rather than just dancing around and waving a big sign. Maybe it's micro-protesting rather than macro-protesting. If cars are stopped at a signal, I will walk the curb up the line if cars making eye contact with individuals in each car and displaying my sign. I try to make it personal, one-on one. The same can be done with pedestreans, not confrontational, but certainly trying to actively convey the message of the sign. Am I off base with this?
Remember what I said too, these signs are scalable. You can put one or two letters on a page and build a big sign like a puzzle. Actually both the signs in my pix are made like that, in several pieces then assembled on the foam core.
