Your signage is your first — and one of your best — opportunities to communicate with the public. Signage must be effectively designed, well manufactured and correctly installed to optimize your message. From a business perspective, a sign is not best viewed as an expense, but as an investment. You pay for the sign once, yet, […]
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Fourteenth Amendment Application to Sign Control
Fourteenth Amendment Application to Sign Control Under the Fourteenth Amendment, applicable to the states and their subdivisions, a state or local-government regulation may not deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deprive a person of equal protection of the laws. Due process. A fundamental requirement of due process […]
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First Amendment Application to Sign Control
The Fourteenth Amendment makes the First Amendment’s freedom-of-speech provision applicable to states and their political subdivisions. While many sign codes begin as content neutral “time, place, and manner” regulations (or “police power” exercises), further analysis often reveals the ordinance violates First Amendment “free speech” guarantees. Even in cases where the subject ordinance is not per se […]
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Fifth Amendment Application to Sign Control
The Fifth Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. It contains two guarantees: The “due process” clause, as in the Fourteenth Amendment, protects citizens from government action that arbitrarily deprives them of a fundamental right without due process of law, and it applies to both the act itself and the procedures incidental to […]
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Signs and Your Business (1977)
SBA aid discusses signs, what they can do for your business, and how they can be used to advantage. Download Signs and your business
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What’s Your Signage? (2004)
How On-Premise Signs Help Small Businesses Tap into a Hidden Profit Center A handbook developed by The New York State Small Business Development Center and the Signage Foundation for Communications Excellence. Download What’s Your Signage?
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Representative Options
By Bill Dorsey The on-premise and outdoor-advertising industries are periodically subject to both pending and proposed legislation. Here’s how five spokesmen for national sign associations protect and defend their industries. The roles played by most associations are varied, but most have at least one role in common: They all serve as legislative watchdogs for their […]
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Sign Codes and the Need for Advocacy
The following article originally appeared in the October 1983 issue of Signs of the Times magazine. This is Part II of a speech given at the Eight-Sheet Outdoor convention in San Francisco. By R. James Claus Objectives in code writing Sign-industry involvement in the code-writing process should include two goals: That signs be regulated to conform […]
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Bob Aran Reflects on 30-year Sign-Legislation Career
The following article originally appeared in the February 2004 issue of Signs of the Times magazine. Were you an attorney first, who became interested in sign codes, or did you have an interest in signs that ended up being sign-code based? I majored in interpersonal relationships (literary related) during my undergraduate work at Pepperdine University. […]
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Bill Introduced to Curb Federal Prison Industries
(The following was reported by the Specialty Graphic Imaging Assn. in 2016) Congressman Bill Huizenga (MI-02) has introduced H.R. 4671, The Small Business Protection Act. The goal of this legislation is to end UNICOR’s government monopoly and force it to compete with the private sector. Currently, UNICOR, also known as Federal Prison Industries, automatically gets […]
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