In the old days of sign-making there were basically two options: painting and laying pre-cut pieces of colored vinyl on a substrate (wood, pvc, metal, or banner material).
The painting option is pretty straight-forward: paint can be mixed to just about any color and if applied to wood, you can create gradients (think the colors of a sunset—yellow to red-or an ocean—from dark blue to light blue). The problem with paint, however, is the cost and the necessity of using wood as the substrate.
Laying pre-cut pieces of vinyl is the way a lot of banners used to be made. It’s very time-consuming and the design is very limited because you can’t have full color or gradient backgrounds and each piece, whether an object, like a tree, or a letter, can only be one solid color. Most sign shops probably keep 10 or so colors in stock, which works if you want black, red or dark blue, but is very limiting if you want any of the colors outside of what you might find in a Crayola 8 crayon set.
These designs are very drab, simplistic and very time consuming to put together. One of the sign shops in Kailua-Kona charges $108 for a 6’ x 2’ banner with three colors—$22 more than Kona Impact charges for the same size.
How are Kona Impact’s banner and signs different? We print directly to a material. As such, you can have thousands of colors, gradients and full color backgrounds. Our signs are usually printed vinyl, which is then laminated, and then applied to a solid pvc substrate. Because each letter is not cut and applied to the pvc, our signs will not have the peeling your see on signs made from cut vinyl. And, truth be told, we can make signs faster than the cut vinyl way, which is why a standard 6’ x 2’ sign from us is 20% less expensive.
So, what would you prefer: simple designs and high costs or better looking signs and lower costs? If you prefer the latter, give us a call at Kona Impact 329-6077.