Bad Billboards

Highway 280 in Saint Paul must be the ugliest highway in the Twin Cities, and that's saying something, since highways are generally ugly. Part of the reason it's so ugly is because it's over-ful with billboards, and of late, it seems as though those billboards have gotten more and more badly designed. 

Between University Avenue and Como Avenue, heading north, there are seven billboards, and not a single one of them is what I would call good. Only three of them are even readable, and of those one isn't really understandable. I'll group them from best to worst.

The best ones are not good:

 

The headline is readable, but the type along the bottom is not. Maybe that doesn't matter, as long as you know who Tom Barnard is. (I am not the audience for this billboard, however.)

Probably the best one, overall. It follows the rule of minimal words, gets the point across, and has a snazzy graphic, too.

This one has nice design, but the nice readable DEAN'S DOES type doesn't tell you what Dean's does. The designer left that for the low-contrast red type on a blue background: one of the worst color contrasts there is. A driver moving past at 55 mph or more cannot read that, let alone the tiny white type at the bottom. I still don't know what that part says.

The worst billboards are even worse, though:

I know this photo is bad, but the billboard is bad as well. Sure, you can read the phone number, and maybe that's enough. But the two guys in suits and the phone numbers is really all you get from it at 55 mph. And the color red.

Obscured behind a power line, I think this one may be a PSA. I have no idea what it's about. The headline is about reminding you to do some kind of checkup or change your smoke detectors or something... but that part — the real content! — is tiny, so I don't remember what it was. The too-long, not very clever part in the funky typeface at the top says "IF YOU SMOKED WHEN MONITORS WERE ALL MONOCHROME."

Here's another one that's a mystery to me. I have no idea what this billboard is for. A real estate service of some kind, maybe? Why would anyone bother to check into it from this billboard? And the tiny type below the headline might as well not be there.

Finally, even without my blurry photo, this is the worst one of all. Four lines of all-caps, tightly stacked extended type. And the words are not clever, so they're not worth struggling through. Then there's a logo at bottom right that I don't recognize or connect with anything. Some kind of crypto? Oh geez, get me out of here.

These businesses are paying at least a thousand dollars per month for these things, maybe a lot more given the highway location. I don't understand why they can't spend a little bit more money putting something onto them that actually makes it worth their expenditure.

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I apologize for the bad photos; it's hard to take photos of billboards while going up a highway, even if you aren't the one driving. 

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Here's an example of a local billboard done right from one of my past posts.