Vinyl

A recent development in the long history of sign-making is self-adhesive vinyl. A roll of the plastic material, with its waxed-paper backing, is fed into a plotter equipped with a sharp, swiveling blade. (Plotters are actually rather simple: a pen or knife slides back and forth while a roll of material, paper, vinyl, anything, feeds in and out; if you imagine those two motions happening simultaneously, you'll see how any size arc or line can be scribed by the machine.)

My setup is CorelDRAW (X5) for a front end, CoCut 2011 for translating to and driving the plotter/cutter, and a Summa D60 for a backend.

Left: some basic vinyl-working tools—transfer tape, Xacto knife, tweezers and squeegee.

Right: my plotter/cutter and a selection of vinyl; above is a roll of paper for drawing large plots.

A computer sends the instructions for the two basic motions of the blade and mechanically perfect cuts are made in the vinyl. The unwanted material is picked off and discarded (a process known as weeding), transfer tape (basically extra large sizes of masking tape) is applied to the front of the image, and the vinyl is lifted up and placed where desired, finally pressed down with a squeegee. It sounds much easier than it is; as with all aspects of commercial art, much practice is required to gain skill.

Most sign shops have come to produce vinyl signs almost exclusively, citing the speed, accuracy, and economy of the machine work. While I think the medium is eminently suitable for the mundane jobs that sign painters always found boring, like the dozen "Tenant Parking Only" signs for the local apartment complex, they lack the character of hand-painted signs.

Vinyl Prints

They work like stickers, but they’re actually wide-format inkjet printing on vinyl. As with decals, multiple copies in different sizes can be applied to various surfaces, maintaining consistency between all the different ways a business is “branded”—signage no longer has to be a simplified, dumbed-down version of the fine art on a business’s stationery.

They’re printed on a very sturdy self-adhesive white vinyl that resembles fine paper; they are then laminated with an ultra-violet-screening plastic that keeps them new-looking for years.

The same image can be resized and adapted to different "venues".

←The truck version is applied to magnetic material;

the other is applied directly to the motorcycle gas tank.→

In this example, the hanging sign at Point Reyes Realty in Olema is painted, but the sandwich board “For Sale” sign utilizes vinyl prints.

Another example: I painted the dentist’s sign on the left; he later sold his practice to a dentist who had another office in San Francisco. The buyer wanted the tree logo on a new sign for his other office, but the cost of painting another just like it was prohibitive. So I photographed the logo, had vinyl prints made from the photographs, and then applied them to the smooth ovals I’d created in the middle of the new sandblast sign.

Left: the original painting.

Right: “decal” made from a photograph.

For this menuboard I applied strips of lettering printed on white self-adhesive vinyl to blue-painted MDO signboard. The prices are on separate strips; they have the advantage of being easy to change. The blue headers are ordinary vinyl letters.

As this example shows, there is almost no limit to what can be achieved. Just about anything printable on an inkjet printer from a graphics program like Illustrator, as the original flyer on which this is based was, can be enlarged and printed out on vinyl.

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