We’ve been serving our community printing banners and signs since 1992. Back then, we were the first to pave the way with online design. Now, of course, it’s a staple in many industries. There are very few items you cannot personalize on your own somewhere online. We’ve seen it all from shoes to water crock pots. It’s a crazy, people love to customize the things they use every day. And it all started here!
Initially our vision was just to make designing signs easier. In the past, we would handle this one of two ways. The first way would be just to get some basic info, make a basic sign, cut the vinyl and make a magnetic sign. It was easy, people were satisfied and we could continue business as usual. However as things became more complex, our clients wanted more control over their signs. They wanted to make suggestions and have more complex designs. When we became one of the first companies to print directly on magnetic material, design options became vertically unlimited, as did client’s requests. Our solution was to build our online design tool.
So why design your own… anything? We think it’s quite fantastic, let us tell you why!
Cheaper products
Hiring skilled graphic designers is expensive! Designing signs is a very basic and boring task for most graphic designers. Therefore, this industry has a conundrum, either we hire inexperienced designers and get unreliable work or we underutilize skilled designers and pay a premium for mostly basic design work. It’s not our goal to put our graphic designers out of work, but rather have them focused on more complex designs.
By providing some pre-made templates or a plank canvas and allowing our clients to design, we’re able to cut down the amount of time our expensive designers spend making simple designs like business cards or magnetic car signs. This translates to much lower prices for our clients. The bulk of markup in our industry is in labor. So by allowing you to tinker as much and as long as you’d like, we don’t have to charge for design sessions! It’s a win-win all around, we think!
Unlimited design time
In the past, we would have to schedule times to meet with clients and design their signs. Not only did this add to the final cost of the project, it was massively time consuming. Clients are limited to our availability and hours and if it doesn’t match up with their schedule, we’re left collaborating via email which is always frustrating!
Enabling online design completely breaks those chains! Design whenever you want. Design in the middle of the night in your underwear for all we care! Save designs and come back next week after vacation or design on vacation. We don’t mind at all, though your family might!
Instant proofing
Once you’ve finally got that design nailed down, due to the nature of online design, you’ve instantly got your proof as well! Your proof is live. We don’t have to email you a proof after long conversations. You don’t have to come into the office. It’s just there, perfect, just like you designed it!
In cases where you need approval from your supervisor, friend or family member, it’s also there! Collaborating with several people outside our shop is much easier. Once you’ve finished your design, simply save it and show them whenever you can! If they want to make more changes, that’s also easy! Everything is simplified this way.
Full control
Perhaps the best reason online design rocks is because you get total control. Nobody likes envisioning a design in their head, then trying to translate that to words to tell someone else how to do it. We certainly don’t! Designing it yourself gives you total freedom – full control! It’s glorious. You can move things where you want, you can experiment without feeling like someone’s going to laugh at your design. Move text or clipart as much as you want wherever you want. You get the idea, control is great and designing yourself is better.
Design from scratch or from a template
We think you’ll agree that in most cases, online design is ideal to the traditional sign design methods. Of course, if you still want us to design your sign for you we will! We would do anything for our customers. If you do decide to get crafty and try your hand at the designer, just remember; you can start from scratch or a pre-made template with almost any of our products. Pre-made product templates are designs we’ve prepared for you to help you get started with the creative process. You can simply pop one open and just customize the parts that you need to, while all the other design elements, clipart and colors were pre selected. If you’re daring, you can even edit those portions of the design as you desire.
When it comes to designing online, you know you can trust the company who paved the way. Over the years, our online designer has been updated and simplified using feedback from our community of loyal customers. We love what we’ve created and hope you will too!
