How To Make Banners

When you invest money into your business, every penny counts, and we want to show you how to make a banner to make your business stand out! This article can also help you if you don’t have a business and you need a banner for a personal event. Something like a birthday party, wedding, or Bat Mitzvah. Buy Vinyl banners here!

Once you learn how to make a banner you'll understand why it's one of the easiest ways to catch someone's eye from far away. Creating a banner and using it is one of the most simple, easy-to-use, and effective methods of advertising. If you never made a banner, don't worry, we'll walk you through step-by-step if you a do it yourself kind of person.

How To Make A Banner - Step by Step Guide For Success

If you've ever walked or driven by a business and they didn't have any signage, what did you probably do? You walked on by because they didn’t take the time of creating a banner to get noticed. If there is a business who doesn’t know how to make a banner and put it on display, they’re leaving money on the table. So if you've seen another business without proper signage, you know learning how to make banners is one of the first steps to getting your brand noticed. So, you're going to want to learn how to make a banner for yourself.

Learning how to make banners the right way it's super important. If you want to put your best foot forward out into the world (and we know you do!) learning how to make banners is critical to attracting the right people to your shop, pop up, or craft show booth.

When you're creating a banner, there are a few things that we'd like you to know. If you have questions about how to make banners if you're a do it yourself kind of person, you're going to want to keep reading this article. In the next section, we're going to get into some info from the printing pros!

how to make banners now open sign

Banner Design Tips & Tricks

If you're making a banner, you got to make sure and have the right resolution. There's a difference between high resolution and low resolution. We have some vinyl banner design tips for your background and lots of other tips to follow. Let's do some basics.

Banner Background

The banner background, images, and fonts need to be high-resolution and have a complementary color scheme that’s easy to read. The first example you can read the large fonts easily, and the black letters look good on the white background.

creating a banner 3 examples

Now we're going to mix it up a bit.

Check out the font color of that middle banner? It’s painful to look at. The first one is easy to read. The third one is probably a little tweaky too.

Many times dark fonts on a white or light colored background are a safe way to go.

Now we'll talk about how to get your banner set up to get printed so it looks incredible.

High-Resolution

High-resolution images are larger files to make your graphics have the crispest look and vibrant colors. When your banner has a high resolution, it won't show any pixels. The minimum resolution needed for large printing is 300 DPI or dots per inch. Now let's talk a little more into low-resolution files.

Low-Resolution

A low-resolution file type is best for online formats. If you're on Pinterest or some other social media, a low-resolution file is usually okay. Low resolution is considered to be generally 72 DPI. So one thing to note if you have a great picture on Instagram, and you want to get it printed, it may not have a high enough resolution to get a high-quality image in a larger format. So check your file size and dots per inch. They need to be 300 to get a good print.

So if you're working with a graphic designer, make sure you tell them your image needs to be high resolution for printing. If you're using imagery from stock photo websites, we suggest downloading the biggest size to make sure you have a high enough resolution. If you're creating your own banner and you're using Photoshop to do your own graphics here's a great article on how to change DPI in Photoshop. When it comes to creating large banners, Size matters.

Banner Lettering and Fonts

Not only does size matter when it comes to banners your font style also matters. Think about some of your favorite brands. They're easy to read and memorable. Or even some of your least favorite brands are very recognizable. Big brands keep their message consistent, so should you.

When your doing branding a general rule of thumb is to stick to two or three fonts across the board. You can also keep the same fonts through all of your advertising. It doesn't matter if it's on stickers, banners, or social media online. Keeping things consistent helps create brand loyalty. When people see your words and color scheme, they'll know it's you (and that's what you want).

font ideas

Want Unique Lettering Ideas For Your Banner?

If you want to use a different kind of font than the usual for your personalized banner, you can check out dafont.com. There are some cool downloadable free fonts you can choose from for your brand. When you're choosing font packages to download, make sure you pick ones that are easy to read. If you got to have a handwritten look font, you'd probably want to choose a more simple font to go with it.

Just imagine using all of your social media posts in cursive. It might make it hard for people to read. You want to make it easy for people to recognize your message, your colors, and your brand in all of your media outlets and advertising.

There are many traditional fonts like Arial and Helvetica. These are popular fonts people use because they work. They're simple and easy to read. Also, make sure your color scheme is easy to read with any fonts you choose. Check out all these colors you could use for your fonts and branding online with CMYK colors. Another thing to note.

Stay Away From Bad Color Scheme or Hard To Read Fonts

Here is a link to an easy to use color contrast checkers. When you use the color checker, you can make sure the font color is readable. ColourContrastCheck.com.

If you already have a website created at checkmycolors.com, you can plug in your web address and make sure the contrast ratio, the brightness, and the color difference all are cohesive on your site. It gives you Red X's when something is not working in an easy-to-read way.

Even if you're not a designer you can use colorsafe.co. It has color palettes that follow the WCAG Guidelines that suggest the proper color contrasts to use. This checker will generate a color palette for you! After you plug in your background color hex code your font family, your font size, and your font weight, it will take you to another page. Next, click on a color square so you can check out your text in the toolbar above. Then you can create a palette of colors that will look good on the background you've chosen.

Since we're getting into colors, let's talk more about the color mode. You'll need to make sure your color modes are set up correctly for printing. (CMYK is the best for printing!).

Color Mode

According to adobe.com there are 5 different color modes:

RGB mode
CMYK mode
Grayscale mode
Bitmap mode
Index mode

We're going to talk about color modes that will be important for your banner creation.

RGB

Here's the RGB breakdown:

R-Red

G-Green

B-Blue

RGB acronym of the colors that are used in computer monitors or other digital devices. You can make any color you can see what different variations of R, G & B. It is known as an additive color mode.

CMYK

CMYK color mode is used in printing processes. Here's the breakdown.

C-Cyan

M-Magenta

Y-Yellow

K-Key (or black)

So if you have a banner with a white background, the CMYK colors will be used to print the actual color parts of your banner. The white will be left alone. CMYK is a subtractive color mode. When you are creating a lightweight banner, you want to make sure to use CMYK mode. This matters.

Because if your banner is in RGB mode it can still get printed, but something could happen. The colors you expect look different due to using the wrong color mode in your file. You've also probably heard about something else called Pantone. Let’s get into that bit.

Pantone - PMS

Pantone is known as a color matching system. You can read all about it at Wikipedia if you’re feeling like a color geek.

So if your graphic design files are in Pantone, you can also set these to CMYK to get advertising materials printed. You can check out this blog of how to convert Pantone to CMYK for you banner projects. File modes matter!

vinyl banner on a fence

Where To Hang Your Banner

As business folks always say location, location, location. Where you hang your banner matters. Will your banner promote your grand opening at your brick-and-mortar store? Or will it be outside at a craft show? Or a more long-term banner on the side of your building? If you don’t know how to hang your banner, there are plenty of options you can learn about too.

You'll need to decide where you want to put your banner. On a fence, on a tent, in between trees?

When you think of where you hang it, you also need to take into consideration the font size. Will people be able to read your banner from the bus station? The subway? Where the highway? You also want to think about the number of words you can have on your banner, and how you can fit what you need to say in the allowed space.

Font Size For Your Banner

You could guess on your font size, but then people might not end up being able to read it. So let's go with a scientific approach when it comes to picking the right size. The point size is the size of your font. 1 pt is 1/72 of an inch according to James Madison University School of Media Arts And Design.

A general guideline for figuring out banner font size is one inch (which is 72 points) for every 10 feet of distance away from a banner. Here's easy to use the chart we created, so you don't have to do any math. We want to make it easy for you to create the perfect banner with easy to read words!

font size chart for banners

We've noticed some big billboards with too many words are hard to read. Also, think about if people are driving by you don't want them to get distracted by reading too much. So you want to keep the message of your banner simple. It doesn't need to be too wordy. You want to catch your potential customer's eyes and let them know quickly what your business is about with the basic information worded the right way that makes people want to buy from you.

When You're Writing The Copy For Your Banner

Think about the benefits to the customer. Write them out and pick out your best ones. Or if can always ask the pros for writing help.
Make sure to put your website, phone number, or address if you want people to stop by your store or get in touch.
Think about why you're making this banner and how your service can help other people.

Inside or Outside?

Don't forget about if you want to hang your banner outside or inside? Because you'll need to think about if you're going do you need grommets and drill holes, or if you're going to hang your banner from a pole? These are all things to take into consideration.

The great thing is at printmoz we use durable vinyl for all of our banners. They're lightweight, water resistant, fade resistant, tear resistant, and they'll look great for a long time.

Banner Finish Options

There are so many options to hang your banner. Here are some things you can think about when you're ordering a banner.

Nickel grommets: Nickel grommets are recommended on most banners. When you place your order we can easily add hems and grommets, they will keep your banner from tearing when you hang it. If you simply use a hole punch in your banner and hang it outside with zip ties and windy conditions your banner can easily tear. So be safe get the nickel grommets added.

Hems: But if you want a hem differently, just let our customer support know. You can add a seam to every edge if you want that finished look.
Pole pockets: If you want a pole pocket for your banner, no problem! These are often used on the sides of poles in towns and cities.
X-stand: These are traditionally used for vertical banners. If you’ve got a banner tall skinny banner this is a great choice for inside events.
Roll up banners/ Retractable banners: They're self-contained and are attached to the stand. If you're doing inside events, these work great.

Banner Hanging Accessories You May Need

Carabiners
Zip Ties
Suction Cups
Rope

We hope you've learned a lot about how to make a banner today. You'll be on your way to getting more business with your great ideas! If you have any questions, please reach out to our amazing customer support. They're here for your business needs!

Henry Killingsworth a year ago

I'm glad you mentioned that it is important to use an image that has a high DPI in order to get a vibrant and crisp looking banner. My wife and I want to have a garage sale soon so that we can sell some of the junk that we have been accumulating in our garage. It seems like it would be a good idea for us to find a professional graphic designer that can help us make a banner.