Changes

* Write only the initial letters in capitals. The human brain detects a word not only by combining a few letters, but also by recognizing the different ascenders and descenders (the heights of the different words). When writing only in capital letters you lose this advantage. That's why street signs respect the upper and lower case.

Make a sign of a large sheet of brightly colored paper glued to a sheet of cardboard. Cover this with self adhesive transparent book wrap. Now you have a re-usable sign which you can use with a whiteboard marker and clean again with a small towel.

Make use of waterproof, dust-proof document bags. There you can store many sheets of paper and signs you can reuse. Nothing falls out, you could hang them somewhere and you can use both sides of the folder to have two signs at once. Ortlieb is one company that produces good ones.

Buy a pad of A4 plain paper, and use it inside a waterproof, dust-proof transparent plastic folder that you can find in most stationary shops. When writing, insert something under the page to stop the pen ink running through to the page underneath (a document bag is good for this). With a pad of paper, you can quickly flip through pages to find the sign you need. Also, the pad can be a great souvenir of your journey.

[[File:Img_l_1306483.jpg|thumb|180px|right|[[User:MayaCova|MayaCova]] using was using a white board with considerable success.]]

If you're hitching in a foreign country, it might be a good thing to express your nationality on your sign. Drivers will think you're more intresting, or will feel sorry that someone who lives that far off has to stand by the road in his country. For example, [[User:Nathan|Nathan]] and [[User:Rocky|Bob]], who hitched through France had great help writing '2 belges' on their sign.

If you have access to a computer with a printer, you can make a quality hitch sign easily then. Since most languages read horizontally, set the page orientation to be landscape but with a size twice long as a normal A4 sheet. For a place name no longer than 9 letters, you can set the font size from 200 to 500 points to fully utilise the page size in one line; longer place names can be wrapped into two lines. Using a tiled printing software, you can print the long page to two sheets. Cut off the short tiling margin of one sheet and glue two sheets together, find a cardboard of same size and use four paper clips to pin the paper onto it, a lightweight wind-resistant hitch sign is ready to use. You don't need a waterproof sign, if you don't hitch in the rain or underwater. The plastic bag idea in previous tips will reduce contrast and introduce reflectivity. In case of that it rains, just wrap your hitch sign with the cling film from kitchen and it will work fine.