Interpretation Artwork & Design

Welcome to Shelley Signs. We are a leading supplier of external signs and panels with particular expertise in Interpretation Signs. For a chat about the options phone Robert Shelley on 01743 460996 or to request more details complete this Enquiry Form

Shelley Signs offer a full service for Interpretation Signs – please follow these links for more information about our in-house design,  submitting your own artwork, Framing Options, materials and general guidance about Interpretive Boards.   Guidance on maps and popular styles can be found at the Maps link.

Also known as Interpretive, Interpretative signs, panels, boards

Product Overview

To produce a high-quality interpretive panel will take a large amount of research and planning, the main key factor to consider is what message you are trying to convey, how will it be conveyed and who are your target audiences. The interpretive panel needs to be inviting with stylish and attractive illustrations in an array of colours befitting its surroundings, it needs to catch the eye of the visitor and not only make them stop and look at the interpretive panel, but give them the want to read the information displayed on it, without them knowing this will educate the visitors on their surroundings and give them more of a reason to return.

Technical Specification

Our design team have an array of PC based design programmes including Apple mac in our design studio at Shelley Signs. Once your artwork has been completed we can make it available for you to view in several ways. We can supply your artwork to you via a disc, memory stick, via email or we can upload it to our FTP site as ‘You Send It’. For all electronic artwork, we would recommend it be viewed on our FTP site as the file size for artwork for an interpretive sign is larger than many email providers will allow.

Whatever the design content we can incorporate original or scanned artwork into our client’s final design. No matter whether the content is a watercolour, watercolour illustrations, photographs or even etchings our design studio at Shelley Signs can create our client’s design from the initial preliminary stages.

Shelley Signs will also undertake the full design of any interpretive sign or panel. Our experienced design team are Ruth and Nigel, Ruth is a superb illustrator, whose specialist area is a natural history and wildlife interpretation pictures. Ruth mainly works with watercolours and has produced some of the most beautiful and striking designs for our projects. Nigel however specialises in historical and archaeological illustrations, he has offered a large number of brilliant solutions to many of our clients at Shelley Signs who have needed an interpretation panel for historical buildings or scenes.

For those clients who require maps of a park and in many cases the surrounding area, we have many different styles of maps to choose from. These options include a simple flat style map, an extensively details 3D map or even a birds-eye view style map that will illustrate the topography of the area. One main fact to remember when choosing which style map to have is that a birds-eye view map should only be considered as a representation of the chosen area and not an accurate plan, this being said birds-eye view maps can cover both rural and urban environments.

Another main key factor of a well planned and successful interpretation sign or panel is its text and content. Although we do offer a service to our clients where we will fully research the project and script the interpretive panels from scratch, we do prefer our clients to try to write or at least draft the text for their sign wherever possible as we believe this gives the interpretation a personal touch. For those clients that do try to undertake the writing themselves, we do offer an editing and copywriting service where we can make any alterations that are necessary to fine-tune your text. Whilst writing the text for your interpretive panel it is however vital to ensure the text is easy to read and understandable, do not fall into the catch of becoming too technical, we do find in some instances a third party writer can usually find it easier to provide the text at a level of perspective befitting the target audience.

Case Study

Shelley Signs were commissioned by The City of Stoke on Trent to undertake a project to redraft text into a relevant and apt format for interpretation that could be displayed on interpretive panels or signs. All the text was to be gathered from a large amount of research information that was provided to us.