Welcome signs, seating charts, and letters you can read from the door.

The signs almost every event needs

• Welcome sign — the one at the entrance with names and date. 24×36 inches on an easel is the standard for a reason: it fills a doorway without blocking it, and it reads from twenty feet.
• Seating chart — the hardest-working sign of the night, and the one most often made too small. More on sizing it below.
• Bar and drinks menu — usually 18×24, often two of them so the bar does not develop a single line.
• Table numbers and place cards — small rigid or acrylic pieces, printed or with cut vinyl.
• Directional and parking signs — the ones that stop the phone calls. Outdoor stake signs live on our yard sign material rather than foam board.
• Program, memorial, guestbook, and hashtag signs — the small pieces that make a room feel considered.

Getting the seating chart right

This is the sign people stand in front of, so it deserves more thought than it usually gets. Two practical rules:

• List guests alphabetically by last name, not grouped by table. Above roughly a hundred guests this is the difference between a room that seats itself and a bottleneck at the door. Each guest scans for their own surname and reads off a table number. Grouping by table forces everyone to read every table.
• Size it to the list. 24×36 handles most weddings. Past about 150 guests, go to 30×40 or split it into two boards so the type does not shrink below readable. If names drop under about half an inch tall, you have too many names on one board.

Build it last. Seating charts are the piece most likely to change in the final fortnight, so we hold that file until your RSVPs settle and print it late on purpose.

Materials, and what each one is actually for

• Foam board — light, inexpensive, good-looking indoors, and the standard for welcome signs and charts on an easel. It dents if you look at it wrong and it is finished the moment it gets rained on. Indoor only.
• PVC board — rigid, a bit heavier, will not dent from a bump, and survives a covered outdoor ceremony. The sensible upgrade when a sign has to stand outside or get handled.
• Acrylic — clear, frosted, white, or black, either printed or with cut vinyl applied. This is the piece that looks like money in photographs, and it is the one people keep afterwards. Heavier, so it wants a solid easel.
• Aluminum composite — for anything that has to live outdoors all weekend regardless of weather.
• Corrugated plastic on a stake — for parking and directional signs along a drive. Cheap, disposable, exactly right for the job.

If a sign is going outside on an easel, weight the base. A 24×36 board is a sail, and a gust across an open field takes it down along with whatever it lands on.

Cut vinyl lettering on surfaces you already have

Not everything needs to be a board. Cut vinyl applies directly to mirrors, acrylic, glass doors, windows, the face of a bar, and sealed wood — and because the material itself is the letterform, it reads as painted rather than printed. A thrifted mirror with your seating list applied in cut vinyl costs a fraction of a custom acrylic panel and photographs better than either.

The same technique covers quotes on walls, names on entry glass, and vows or lyrics down an aisle. It all comes off clean afterwards. See window and floor graphics for the commercial version of exactly the same work.

Large letters

Cut letters are a different product from a printed sign: each letter is cut individually from rigid material and mounted or freestanding, so it throws a real shadow and reads as an object in the room rather than a picture of one.

• PVC — light, paintable to any color, and the practical choice for larger letters and full words. Light enough to hang on a backdrop frame.
• Acrylic — crisper cut edges and a more premium finish, in gloss, matte, frosted, or a brushed metal look.
• Layered — a painted backer with a raised face for depth on a feature wall.

Common asks are a couple's initials, a short word behind a bar or backdrop, table names, and a company name for a corporate night. Sizing follows the same rule as any signage: roughly one inch of letter height per ten feet of viewing distance, which is a United States Sign Council figure and the reason event letters usually want to be bigger than they first look on a plan. We make these, we do not rent them — you keep them.

Scope, plainly

We do not rent light-up marquee letters, and we do not build illuminated or exterior signage — channel letters, monument signs, and anything permitted is a different trade, and we would rather say so than subcontract it. Local event rental companies do the four-foot bulb letters properly. What we make is printed and cut signage: boards, acrylic, cut vinyl, and cut dimensional letters.

Most events order these as a set, and there is a real advantage in doing so — one design pass keeps the welcome sign, the chart, the bar menu, and the table numbers looking like one suite instead of five separate orders. Printed items like programs and place cards can be matched to them from our print and stationery side, and anything oversized comes off the same large-format printer on the same color profile.

Send us your list of signs and we will spec materials and sizes for each one.