Designing Art for Billboards; and a Fictional Small Town

Billboards: "General Recommendations and Guidelines"
Graphic Design, Graphic Art I, Western Illinois University

"The most important factor in the outdoor advertising market is to remember that outdoor posters have to deliver a single, high-impact message in a very short time period. The poster should have bright colors and be legible from a distance. Here are some tips for designing your outdoor poster:..."

The rest of the page is divided into sections, with a brief and practical discussion of these points:

• Understand Your Audience
• Keep It Simple, Bold and Easy to Read
• Color and Contrast
• Production Details

This page is a pretty good one-stop FAQ for designing billboard art in America. Not that many people are passionately interested in that sort of thing.

Then, there are folks like me. I'm really interested in advertising, billboards, cosmology, daguerreotypes, ethics, Freya: and so on, up the alphabet.

I found this page while researching billboard design for Loonfoot Falls, Minnesota. That's a fictional small town, (very) loosely based on my experiences and observations in Minnesota towns. Think Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, except written by someone who actually lives in a place like that.

So far, your only up-to-date source for information about Loonfoot Falls is a weekly column Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette: a weekly newspaper owned and operated by one of the many Johnsons who live in the town.