It’s a sign of things to come…

So after much slaving back and forth with the focus group (also known as family and friends), I finalized a sign design for the front yard and had it fabricated by our local Fastsigns store.  Here’s the design from Illustrator.

In the process of working on this, I learned a lot that I wish I’d already known about the CMYK color space and how it differs from graphic design for the web.  Specifically – apparently basing my entire brand around a dark, intense blue is just about the worst thing I could have done from a color-matching perspective.  It’s been pretty instructive to look at the color matching between an onscreen image, the business cards I recently had printed, and the sign itself.  

So, without further ado, here’s what I got back from the printer last night:

I was very, VERY excited when I saw this peeping through the window at me from inside the sign shop.  I knew that the spec’d size of 5×3 feet was going to be large, but I don’t think I was really prepared for just how large that is.  I felt almost like I was going to fall into the f-hole!  

I have a bit of pride about that part of the design, actually; the f-hole is traced from the fiddle I built last year.  There are some irregularities to it and I went back and checked: yes, they’re really part of the instrument itself.

For some scale, that’s a 34-string harp next to the sign, which is itself close to 5 feet tall!  The sign comes up to my chin or so.  It looks huge inside, but it’s actually the perfect size to go over the existing lawn sign (which doesn’t look all that large in context.)  Thanks, visual perception!

I hope to get the signs (one for each side of the stand in the front yard) mounted soon.