How do you design a billboard that actually works?
Say one thing. You have between two and four seconds with a moving audience, so the working limit is about seven words, one image, a legible brand mark and enormous contrast. Everything else you add makes those four elements harder to read.
The best billboard I saw in Dhaka last year had four words on it and no product shot. The worst had a phone number, two QR codes, a website, three service lines and a photograph of the managing director. Guess which one I can still remember.
The constraint nobody designs for
You do not have a reader. You have a glance — two to four seconds, from a moving vehicle, at an angle, in glare, while somebody else is trying to merge. Every design decision has to survive that.
Which is why the rules below are less about taste and more about physics.
The rules worth keeping
- Seven words, maximum. Six is better. If you cannot get it to seven, the idea is not finished yet.
- One idea, one image. Not a hierarchy of three messages. One.
- Contrast beats beauty. Light type on dark, or dark on light. Nothing subtle survives daylight at distance.
- Brand mark large and early. If a viewer only takes away one thing, it must be who you are.
- Letter height, roughly 25mm per 10 metres of distance. Then go bigger.
- Leave air. A crowded frame reads as noise before it reads as anything else.
The things to cut, in order
| Element | Why it goes |
|---|---|
| QR codes | Nobody scans one from a moving car. Nobody. |
| Website URL | People search your name; they do not memorise a slash |
| Phone numbers | Eleven digits at forty metres in three seconds — no |
| Social handles | The same problem as the URL, in smaller type |
| Body copy | If it needs a sentence, it needs a different medium |
| Secondary offers | The second offer weakens the first |
What to remove first when the frame is too busy
See the actual sites
Every screen has its own page with a photograph, the size, the direction it faces and the hours it runs.
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