Getting Ready For Your Trade Show

We pride ourselves on giving you beautiful, quality graphics fast! As you get geared up for your trade show season, here are some things to help you along the way.

Your Booth

• Have a colorful graphic that catches the customer's eye.

• Have a headline of six words or less that will interest your target customer.

• Very often, something that helps you explain your product as you talk to the customer can be helpful.

Our turn time on most trade show graphics is 2-3 days, so we can get it done fast! If you need design work done, or you have a special order, it may take a few more days.

Whether you are looking for a graphics, pop-up booth, tabletop display, banner stand, or a banner and banner hangers, we can help!

For our compete trade show primer click here! Or call (800) 590-7850

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.

Banner Stands- Everywhere!

I spent 10 days in Scotland in July, and one thing that I noticed was the number of banner stands being used! Most retail stores, the train station, even our little hiker's hotel had a banner stand to communicate their message to passers by.

What's great about them is, first of all, how easy they are to use. Three poles fit together, and you draw the banner out of the cannister and hang it on the pole. Done! No hardware is required, no tools, no stepladder to put fittings in the false ceiling. If you decide to move it, it takes a minute.

We offer two banner stands. Our economy stand will do a great job if you aren't going to beat it around. If it will be transported regularly and you plan to change the graphic a lot, our premium banner stand is a better choice. It's more durable, and the graphic is easy to change yourself.

With either one, you have a way of communicating with your customer quickly, easily, and flexibly. Give it a try!

Lamp Post or Wall Mounted Banners

These banners are wonderful for taking a message down main street! They typically are double sided so they can be read by people going either way, and can be printed on gloss vinyl or matte vinyl. We can make replacement banners, or, if you are starting fresh, we can supply the hardware too. Banner widths are 18”w – 36” and usually no more than 8 feet tall. You should not have more than 24 square feet of graphic to the wind (due to the force on the lamp post).

You can create the graphics, or we can do it for you!

Features of our Lamp Post Banners:
3-5 year life in sunlight

• Vibrant, accurate colors
• Nylon re-enforced material has great strength
• Hemmed around, with pole pockets top and bottom
• Very competitive with screen printing
• Available on matte or gloss 13 oz vinyl

Protecting your print from fading

If you've ever left a magazine on a window sill for a month or two, you'll be familiar with fading. Most printing inks will fade when exposed to UV light. And, since fluorescent lighting also emits UV, it can happen to prints hanging in your office, even if they are not getting direct sunlight from your window.

To keep your prints from fading, we need to use UV stable inks. Anything that is going in a window, or that will be up for years, should be printed with them. UV inks are good for up to two years in sunlight, and just about forever (well, OK, 20 years) in a normal office environment. Trade Show graphics and meeting signs are used for just a few days, and we find that UV inks are not normally required.

People often ask about using lamination to reduce the amount of UV that reaches the print. This is a throwback to the days before we had UV inks. While our testing does show that lamination slows fading, it does not stop it. We think the solution is really to use the inks that do not fade.

The good news is that the latest HP equipment gives excellent color with UV inks. Older equipment did not give us good reds, and we had to make tough choices between color fidelity and longevity. Today, you can get both. Less filling, and tastes great!

More Cutouts!

We've done a lot of cutouts lately, and they are fun! Here's a customer clowning around with one that they brought to a trade show. We've also seen a lot of them being done for promotions, events, and retail stores.

When people talk about green shoots in the economy, this is our gauge- that people are having fun again. Since a lot of cutouts are done for fun things like events, we are calling a turn in the economy. You heard it here first!

Wine Winners

We've had a lot of fun doing blowups of wine labels for Charity Hop, a company that markets the bottling of wine in partnership with a
number of sports celebrities to raise money for charity.

Here are pictures of Mark Buehrle of the White Sox and Derrek Lee of the Cubs with their wine labels. Not only did they turn out great, but we turned them around in four hours!

The best part of all was going to the launch of the Red Sox players wines in Fenway park last year. Good wine, too, we might add. Over the last few years, Charity Hop has released over 30 wines in conjunction with pro athletes, and raised $1.4 million for charity.