Gator Board or Foamcore Board?

If you are having trouble deciding between foamcore and gatorboard, here are two key questions to ask yourself.

1) How long am I going to use this?

If the answer is a few days, go with foamcore, it will work fine and is less expensive than gatorboard. Your typical meeting sign that stands on an easel for a few days can be done very successfully with paper on foamcore board.

Somthing that needs to last should be mounted to gatorboard. Foamcore will bend with changes in humidity, and gatorboard will remain flat for years.

2) How is it going to be used?

If you are going to take it from place to place, gatorboard will look better much longer. It's tougher stuff for going in an out of your car, etc. For things that are really going to be slapped around, consider using our edge trim to protect the edges.

Anything that is a permanent display, like pictures of buildings you have built or historical pictures of your town, should be on gatorboard. For graphics to look good for many years, you should consider UV inks, which will not fade over the years.


Foamcore and gatorboard look a lot alike. The difference is that while foamcore is paper on either side of a slice of styrofoam, gatorboard is a heavy (think oak tag) moisture impregnated paper on either side of the same styrofoam. Since the paper doesn't accept moisture, it is much more stable dimensionally. It's also just plain tougher. Gatorboard comes in black and white, foamcore only in white.

Odd Jobs

Sometimes we get jobs in that are very different from the usual research poster, full-size cutout, or trade show booth. One such odd job was an oversized jigsaw puzzle we did in 2007.

The puzzle was 5’ x 15’ and each piece was somewhere around 5” x 6”. Our entire crew had to pitch in to help with finishing. It was a paper print on gatorboard with a glossy laminate on top, plus all that cutting, trimming, etc. The total puzzle piece count was 509.

One of the things we try to do at MegaPrint, Inc. is print quality work fast. This job took us about 5 days with all 19 of us working on it. We created the pattern over the picture that The Grand Canyon University provided. Here is the puzzle.


The puzzle was created as a teamwork project for The Grand Canyon University. 509 people gathered and each person got one piece of the puzzle. It had become a teamwork project for us as well. Just as we had worked together to create it, they worked together to reconstruct this enormous puzzle.