Notice Workbench

The Aushang: Germany's printed-notice culture

Germany communicates on paper. The Aushang — a printed notice on a shop door, a stairwell wall, or a notice board — is the standard way businesses announce opening hours, closures, and address changes. If you run a shop, café, practice, or studio here, customers genuinely expect one: a locked door without a note reads as unreliable, and a handwritten scrap of squared paper reads as careless. Two terms worth knowing: Öffnungszeiten are opening hours, and Betriebsferien is the very German institution of a company-wide vacation closure, traditionally announced well in advance on exactly this kind of notice.

One message, three levels

A notice works when someone walking past understands it without stopping. That is a structure problem, not a design-talent problem, and it is solved with a simple hierarchy:

• Level 1 — the core message: what is happening, in one line, as large as the page allows. "Closed today." "On vacation until 24 August." "We have moved." If a passer-by reads nothing else, this must land.
• Level 2 — actionable details: dates, hours, the new address, a phone number. Clearly smaller, ideally set as a list rather than a sentence.
• Level 3 — the sender: your business name and perhaps a word of thanks, smallest of all.

Opening hours follow the same logic in miniature: days and times belong in a tidy, consistently formatted list, not in prose. Abbreviate weekdays, group identical time ranges, and flag exceptions separately — anyone forced to calculate in front of your door walks on.

The test is unforgiving but useful: hang up the printout, step three meters back, and give yourself three seconds. If the message doesn't land, rework the hierarchy — the reader won't.

Type size, contrast, and the realities of A4

A door notice is read from two to three meters away. A workable rule of thumb: about one centimeter of letter height per meter of reading distance — which means the headline may take up much of the width of an A4 sheet (the standard German paper format, slightly narrower and taller than US letter) and still be exactly right. Two type sizes are almost always enough; three typefaces are two too many.

For contrast, dark text on a light background beats everything else. Light gray on white, or text over a photo background, costs legibility a notice cannot spare. Use color as an accent — a bar, a line, your shop's brand color — rather than a full-page background: most office printers cannot print borderless anyway, and solid color areas drain cartridges and tend to streak. For an outside door, put the sheet in a clear sleeve or laminate it and tape all four corners; paper on a door curls at the first sign of humidity.

From occasion to finished page: the Aushang-Werkbank

The Aushang-Werkbank builds these rules into the layout itself. It turns opening hours, a vacation closure, or a move into cleanly typeset A4 notices, using five templates — among them Öffnungszeiten, vacation, closed today, and a moving notice — each set in your accent color. Hierarchy, type sizes, and margins are pre-designed; you enter your dates or hours, print, and the page holds together.

The same principles carry beyond the shop door — to the stairwell notice in an apartment building, the office kitchen, the club notice board: core message first, details second, sender last. The tool is free to use after registration, and the first impression at your door stops depending on a felt-tip pen.

Frequently asked questions