The most common sizing mistake is to start from the wall. The sign band is 30 feet wide, so the sign becomes 28 feet wide, and nobody asks whether a driver on the road out front can read it. The second most common mistake is the opposite: a sign sized by feel that turns out to be twice what the town allows.
Gogi Signs sizes every sign from the street first and the building second, then checks it against the town’s rules before design starts. We build signs for businesses across New Jersey and New York City from our shop in Linden. This guide walks through the method in order: the viewing task, the letter height, the sign area, the building, and the limits, with real ordinance examples and a worked storefront.
In this guide
Start From the Viewing Task
Every sign has a critical viewing point: the place where someone decides to slow down, turn in or walk through the door. For a highway storefront that’s several hundred feet up the road. For a downtown shop it’s the sidewalk across the street. Find that point first, because everything else follows from it.
Speed shrinks reading time. The United States Sign Council Foundation allows about 8 seconds of viewer reaction time on a simple road and 10 to 11 seconds in complex traffic, and a car at 40 miles an hour covers 59 feet every second. Our guide to designing signs for different viewing distances goes through the full method. The short version: a sign on a 40 mile an hour road needs to be readable from roughly 500 feet, and a sidewalk sign from about 40.
Letter Height Comes First
Letter height is the number that makes a sign readable. Using the USSC legibility index of 30 feet per inch, 500 feet of reading distance needs letters around 17 inches tall, and 40 feet needs letters under 2 inches, which is why 3 to 6 inches is plenty on a sidewalk. The industry chart published by Signs Now gives the same picture: 12 inch letters read best at 120 feet, 24 inch letters at 240.
Letter Height and Sign Area Are Not the Same
Once the letters are set, the message decides the area. The USSC sign area method adds the space around the letters to the letter area, with a multiplier of about 1.5, so the panel breathes. A 12 letter name at 18 inches in a normal sans serif runs about 13 feet wide and 1.5 feet tall as letters, and the panel or sign band it sits on ends up around 15 feet by 3 feet. A second line of smaller text or a logo adds to that.
Message Length Changes the Required Area
Every word added at the same letter height makes the sign longer, and once the sign hits the town’s cap, every word added makes the letters smaller instead. Keep the business name at full height and cut the rest. A tagline that nobody can read from the road is taking space from the name they could.
What Limits the Size
The Building
The sign band, the awning, the window line and the cornice set the proportions before any ordinance does. A sign that fills its band edge to edge looks crowded, and a sign that floats in a band twice its height looks lost. As a rule, leave at least 10 to 15 percent of the band’s height clear above and below the letters. On a shared building, the landlord’s criteria usually fix the band height and the letter style too. Our guide to shopping center sign requirements covers those.
New Jersey Town Limits
Every New Jersey town sets its own cap, and most write it as either square feet per linear foot of frontage or a percentage of the facade. Here are five real examples from current ordinances:
| Town | Wall sign limit | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Phillipsburg | 2 square feet per linear foot of front facade, and no more than 15 percent of the facade area | Phillipsburg sign ordinance |
| Garwood | 2 square feet per foot of building frontage, maximum 40 square feet | Garwood signage ordinance |
| Barnegat | No more than 20 percent of the wall area, maximum 100 square feet | Barnegat sign ordinance |
| Plainsboro | 28 square feet per sign, facade total 35 square feet or 40 percent of the linear frontage, never over 56 | Plainsboro sign regulations |
| Stafford | By district: 200 square feet or 8 percent of the facade on the highway, 15 square feet or 4 percent in local business zones | Sign standards table |
Take a 25 foot storefront. In Phillipsburg the cap is 50 square feet, in Garwood 40, in Plainsboro 35, and in Stafford’s local business district 15. The same 15 by 3 foot sign from the worked example above, 45 square feet, is fine in one town and three times the limit in another. That’s why we read the ordinance before we draw. Our guide on whether business signs need a permit in New Jersey explains how the application works, and our guide to understanding local sign regulations shows how towns measure area, which also varies.
New York City
In New York City the limit comes from the Zoning Resolution rather than the borough. In C1 and C2 commercial districts, which cover most neighborhood shopping streets, the Zoning Resolution’s sign area rule allows non illuminated signs up to three times the street frontage in feet, with a cap of 150 square feet, and its sign height rule keeps signs below 25 feet above the curb. A 20 foot storefront in Brooklyn gets 60 square feet. Our sister shop in New York covers the rest of the rules in its guide to NYC storefront sign regulations.
The Lease
Landlord sign criteria often sit below the town’s limit, and in a shopping center the center’s criteria usually win. Ask for the sign criteria document before you fall in love with a size.
Illumination and Interior Signs
Lighting buys distance without adding inches. The Penn State study for the USSC Foundation found that internally lit, light on dark signs had the longest legibility distances at night, so a lit sign at the town’s cap outperforms an unlit one of the same size after dark. Our guide to illuminated vs non illuminated signs weighs cost against that gain, and our channel letters and light box signs pages show the lit options.
Test at Scale Before Fabrication
Before anything is built, we print the sign at full size on paper, tape it to the wall and look at it from the critical viewing point. It takes an hour and it has saved more signs than any formula. For a lit sign, look at the mock up at dusk too. Then photograph it for the landlord and the permit file.
Common Sign Sizing Mistakes
- Sizing from the wall. The sign band is a limit, not a target.
- Filling the band. No breathing room reads as clutter from the street.
- Too many words. Every extra word shrinks the name.
- All capitals everywhere. They need about 15 percent more height to read from the same distance.
- Finding the ordinance at permit time. A redesign after the drawings are done costs time and money. See our guide to what affects the cost of commercial signs.
- Sizing interior signs like exterior ones. A 12 inch lobby logo overwhelms the room it sits in.
For window graphics, which are often the biggest sign on the storefront and usually exempt from the wall sign cap, Pixel Wraps, our sister graphics shop, covers window graphics for NJ and NYC.
Common Questions About Business Sign Size
How do I work out the sign size I need?
Find the critical viewing point, measure the distance, divide by a legibility index of about 30 to get letter height in inches, then add the message length and about 50 percent breathing room to get the area. Check that against the sign band, the town limit and the lease.
Does a bigger sign always read better?
No. Past the point where the letters are tall enough for the viewing distance, extra size only adds cost and often clutter. Contrast, lighting, a short message and good placement do more than extra inches.
How is sign area measured?
Most New Jersey towns measure the rectangle that encloses the sign face or, for individual letters, the rectangle around all the letters. Some count the whole background panel. Read the definition in the ordinance because it changes the answer.
What size sign is allowed in New Jersey?
It depends on the town. Common rules are 1 to 2 square feet per linear foot of frontage, or 10 to 20 percent of the facade area, with caps that range from 15 to 200 square feet. Phillipsburg, Garwood, Barnegat, Plainsboro and Stafford are worked examples in this guide.
What size sign is allowed in New York City?
In C1 and C2 commercial districts, non illuminated signs can be up to three times the street frontage in feet, with a cap of 150 square feet, and no sign can sit more than 25 feet above the curb. Other districts allow more, and illuminated signs have separate limits.
Can I check the size before fabrication?
Yes, and you should. We print the design at full size on paper, mount it on the wall and look at it from the viewing point, in daylight and at dusk for lit signs, before anything is built.
Sized From the Street, Not From the Wall
Send us a photo of the building and the address, and we’ll work out the letter height from the viewing point, the sign area from your message, and the town’s limit from the ordinance, then show you a full size mock up before anything is built. Request a free quote or book a site survey. In a town like Hoboken, where the sign bands are narrow and the rules are specific, that first check saves a redesign.
