By Peter Poanessa
Posted on Friday, April 11th, 2025
One of the reasons I love the sign trade is I get bored quickly. This business has allowed me to constantly explore new things and search for new combinations that make interesting, effective and durable signs. I have been making dimensional signs for almost thirty years. When I look back over the years, I see a slow and steady progression in the materials and techniques we use to make dimensional signs.
I started out making almost all my signs from wood (sometimes plywood) and paint. After I began carving, I put most of my effort into carved signs. I prided myself on being able to carve most anything I could dream up.
As my skills improved, I got bored with the physical challenge of carving. I also tired of viewing a carved sign from the typical viewing distance and seeing the distance diminish the 3D effects. In the quest to get more dimension—and to make a living—I started to look for new ways to add dimension to signs without using carvings. Here are three of my favorites:
■ Build signs with separate layered pieces to get the dimensional effect I’m looking for.
■ Replace what might otherwise be just a flat panel with a curved panel. That’s a quick-and-easy way to add depth and shape to a sign. Aluminum composite lends itself to this, so we use it a lot for curved panel signs.
■ Then there is what we call shadow mounting—that is simply spacing layers apart with blocks or studs so you get nice shadows between the layers. This adds dimension that shows up better at a distance.
When you combine different materials, though, it’s important to understand how they will work together. Different materials expand and contract at different rates, and some adhesives are not compatible with various paints and substrates. For instance, we don’t tend to use PVC for large panels because it shrinks and swells a lot and will warp as well. It is, however, an excellent choice for smaller parts, such as letters.
Another favorite material of ours is copper—but it needs to be isolated from steel or aluminum as direct contact will cause rapid corrosion of the steel or aluminum. This is very easy to deal with. All that is needed is something that will not conduct electricity between the metals. This could be thin PVC, nylon washers or even silicone.
Once you get comfortable with these various methods of fabricating dimensional signs, you’ll realize that the possible combinations of materials and techniques are endless. Here are a few signs we made using some of these techniques.
The Keene Fresh Salad sign was made from two layers of ½-in. overlaid plywood laminated with epoxy and a raised, curved aluminum composite panel for the primary sign face. The letters are 1-in. HDU board bonded to ¼-in. PVC board for the outline and backer.
Both the curved panel and the letters are shadow mounted. Finally, we used HDU board for the radish but used 1/8-in. heat-shaped PVC for the leaves. In all we have about 8 inches of total dimension—but with nowhere near the cost of materials or labor it would have taken to fabricate this sign from solid material.
The Fireworks sign is a favorite of mine. The logo came to us in a slightly different configuration and color scheme but I liked the looks of it—and knew it would make a great layered sign.
This sign is built using aluminum composite panels over a frame of 1-in. aluminum tubing. These elements are bonded together with Lord Adhesives 406-19, which we use a lot for assembling synthetic panels and graphics. It sets up fast (15 minutes) and is extremely strong.
The first layer was a brushed aluminum finish, the second layer was ½-in. black PVC board, the third layer is the bricks, flames and primary lettering. The flames are done with reflective film. We built the down-lighting right into the sign so all the electrician had to do was connect the power. I have a thing about poorly lit signs but that’s a story for another day.
The Blueberry Fields sign includes just about everything we do on our current style dimensional sign. The main sign is framed with aluminum tubing and then faced with .100-in.-thick copper plate. This is isolation mounted to prevent contact between the copper and aluminum. The copper was spun with a disk sander for an engine-turned look and clear coated to keep the bright look.
All the graphics and lettering are carved. The header is a composite panel that has compound curves so it flows over the diamond panel. It has simple cutout PVC lettering. The image panel is another layer of composite with a hand-painted scene.
The blueberries are full half-round shaped HDU with heat shaped PVC leaves. Finally, the Natural Foods panel is made from a backer layer of ½-in. PVC board to which we added raised carved applied HDU letters. This sign also had the lights built into it.
The Colony Mill sign was big, and I knew it would need some real depth to give the look we wanted from the viewing distance. This sign is built using 1-in. thin wall aluminum tubing and faced with aluminum composite.
Graphics and lettering are all carved and applied HDU and PVC board. The bricks, tree and primary lettering are all HDU board, and the sub copy and horizontal bars are PVC board. The sign is 12-ft. wide, so being able to build a strong but lightweight sign was important.
For Green Energy Options we needed a real bump. The storefront was actually a store side. They didn’t face the main street, and a projecting sign would not comply with the sign code.
After some head scratching and brainstorming I came up with this rather unique solution. The wide wood band is simply a non-typical shaped awning frame that we applied vertical cedar strips to. This was deemed an architectural projection by the city.
Once that was in place we applied for a permit to mount a parallel sign on it. This gave us good visibility from the road and defined the entrance for them. The lettering and graphics here are again carved HDU board mounted on PVC backers. This type of letter gives a nice sense of depth and shadows and allows for an added outline color for the letters.
The Downtown Grocery sign needed a different look, so a different combination of materials was called for. It was not to be carved because of the overall look they wanted—not due to their budget. This is for a casual gourmet-type restaurant in a ski town in Vermont.
I don’t usually like the look of a thin “blade sign” so even though this sign was to be a flat surface sign, we wanted to see some heft to it. We built it from 1-in. thin wall aluminum tubing for the frame, faced that with aluminum composite and then wrapped that with a cedar outer frame.
The background was finished with a flat black that we roughed up with a Scotch Brite pad. Then we rubbed the background with chalk. The lettering was painted through a mask with brush strokes showing, so as to give an old appearance.
The Blue Trout sign is another case where combining materials made this not only possible but also very strong. This sign has a continuous ¾-in. overlaid plywood core with 1-in. HDU laminated to both sides. It then has another layer of HDU laminated over that for the raised banner.
The challenge was to mount the trout so that it was tough enough to handle the hands that would eventually be all over it. The overlaid core connects at the fin, tail and mouth, and the main panel anchors the fish nicely.
The fish was carved in two halves from HDU board and was bonded to the plywood, using a bed of epoxy. The fish was finished with a base coat of automotive silver metal flake and custom mixed tints in automotive clear coats. The sign totals about 5 inches thick.
Finally, we have The Works Bakery and Cafe. This is a customer we have done a lot of work for in the past who is rebranding their stores. The entire interiors are re-done in old and repurposed materials. Think resawn boards from old beams, welded steel furniture with old tractor seats, that kind of thing.
We wanted to carry that over to the exterior signs, so these were made to have a similar look. They are framed with overlaid plywood, using a bulkhead and stringers like a boat. This allows us to build a basic box that is then clad with copper. No need to worry about corrosion when you have wood touching copper, and this will last for decades without any finish on it.
This was then faced with weathered chestnut boards from an old barn. For the main sign elements we used a mild steel panel that we rusted with salt water in the shop. This was welded over steel framing hammered into an arc.
The raised letters are HDU board with a hand-chiseled finish to them. The graphics are three layers; two layers of ½-in. HDU and a back layer of ¼-in. plywood. These were laminated with epoxy over a curved jig that we made to form a cold-molded curved shape that fit over the curve on the main panel. The finished sign is very striking and has really helped to drive more business into their stores.
There are many ways to produce what we think of as dimensional signs that are not simply carving a design into a 2-in. panel. Next time you are asked to design a dimensional sign, think outside the box. These signs all provided high value advertising for the end user and a tidy profit for our shop. It is hard to beat a win-win situation like that.
Peter Poanessa’s shop, Keene Signworx, is in Keene, New Hampshire. You’ll find his website at www.signworx.com.
This article appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of SignCraft.
