Best Practices to Design Attention-Grabbing School Banners (+ Infographic)

There’s more to creating an outstanding school banner than customizing a template and adding your logo. The good news is once you’ve grabbed students’ attention, you’ve won half of the battle. So designing a genuine, authentic school banner is the most effective way to get students into the spirit of your marketing initiative. But how do you come up with the best school banner idea?

As education administrators, from elementary school to high school alike, you should not look at school banners solely as the tool to promote specific causes, but as the vehicle for building relationships with prospective or former students. However, before establishing a real connection, you need to make an impact. It can be a challenging task though, so nailing the campus banner and design is imperative.

We’ve come up with a hard-to-miss discount for school administrators. So, before you choose any of our custom banners, have a look at these 5 best practices for creating an eye-catching product.

#1. Banner Goals

First things first: Whether you are designing a banner for school sports, back to school banner, high school banner or school spirit banner; it’s crucial to identify your goal, which will lead to your audience respond effectively to your marketing. You can’t go wrong if you start your design with an established purpose in mind.

#2. Consider Three Key Aspects of Banner Design

There are several key elements of design and layout you should consider when creating a school banner. Let’s point out four of the main ones:

• Color: An essential element of effective banner design. It attracts attention and increases retention. Choose colors your school identifies with while maintaining readability. Remember: colors help create depth and contrast, allowing your core message to stand out while images can reinforce your purpose. What shouldn’t you do? Going with too intense or too many colors, as they will distract your audience.

• Balance: Make sure to include enough white space and distribute content and images in your banner in an organized way, so that it looks balanced. When design elements are jammed together, the eye doesn’t know where to look, making the banner difficult to read.

• Fonts: Choose no more than two fonts. Use easy-to-read fonts, but most importantly be consistent in your use of fonts. No matter which one you choose, it’s important that your font’s personality fits your banner purpose.
• Material: This one might go overlooked but is still very crucial when bringing your school banner idea to life. Depending on the placement of the banner, you need to ensure that the material will withstand its environment. For example, a large outdoor banner should not be made out of paper and risk getting destroyed in the elements. In just the same way, you can probably save some money with printing an indoor banner on paper.

Project by Annie Eischen

#3. Maximize Your School Identity and Values

The design, content and images for your banners should be created around your school identity, so students can recall the aspects that make your school different from the others. Whether you’re designing a banner for elementary school, middle school or high school, effective branding does not only get your message out, it also increases school awareness. People will start to create a visual image of how they perceive your school. So, it’s important to transmit your school values throughout a variety of print materials including banners, posters, flags and signs.

Project by Steven Booth

#4. Come Up with a Clear, Compelling Copy and Image

With lower attention spans of students, advertising efforts become harder for administrators and teachers because attracting their attention is not a piece of cake. However, creative school banner ideas and cool messages that promote fun events, trip contests or academic prizes are a great way to get students excited.

Project by Jake White

#5. Let Your Creative Genius Come Out

Being authentic is your ace up your sleeve. High school and college students are constantly surrounded by online advertising, so offline marketing tools can be a great alternative to grab their attention. More than a great banner design, the innovative way you present your message actually builds an emotional connection.

Getting creative with campus banners and designs can include, writing a clever message that plays with words, including a funny picture or pose an interesting question; it all depends on how you want to be perceived. You can even use unique materials, like creating a fabric banner, to leave a lasting impression on your audience.

The Good and The Bad

The good news is that all of these aspects are pretty simple to incorporate in your school banner ideas. You need to get to know the audience to get their attention. The bad news is that your audience, no matter the age, is bombarded by several advertisements every day, which means they would not remember all marketing messages; unless yours really stands out.

You should now have lots of great ideas roaming inside your head. Review these five steps once again and get inspired to get to work on your school banners. Once you’re ready to follow these tried-and-true practices, go ahead and customize your own school banner! If you have any questions, please contact us by writing an email to support@4over4.com.