By signcraft
Posted on Friday, May 1st, 2026
When it comes to long-lasting advertising, an effective, appealing sign is hard to beat. Compare it to the longevity of other types of ads. Online ads? Gone on the next click. TV and radio? Now you see (or hear) it, now you don’t. Newspaper? Out with the evening trash.
But a sign is out there, 24/7, rain or shine, delivering its message. If you divide its cost over its lifespan, it often comes down to dimes per day. That $600 4-by-8 on the front of the body shop? If it lasts four years, the cost is 41 cents a day. The $3300 3D sign for the RV park? If it’s up for six years, it’s less than $1.50 per day. The $450 routine truck lettering job you did last week? Over the four-year life of the truck, it will cost the landscaper about 30 cents per day to keep his name in front of tens— maybe hundreds—of thousands of potential customers.
And signs often last much longer than these estimates—often outlasting the business that they advertise. And the longer they last the lower that cost-per-day falls.
The signs you see here were designed by Gary Godby for Snowshoe Mountain Resort. They were photographed some 13 years after they were installed. Randy Carvell of Graphic Services, Manassas, Virginia, helped produce them.
“It’s amazing how well a sign will hold up,” says Randy, “especially considering the harsh environment up in the mountains of West Virginia. The winters are really cold and summers are hot. We used HDU and PVC to build most of these, and finished them with Matthews polyurethane paints. PVC expands and contracts quite a bit, but the paint stays put. If you use quality materials, a sign can last for years.”
Clients, of course, think of the cost only as what it costs them the day they pay for the sign. They often see their sign as an expense, like paying for a repair or a store fixture, rather than advertising.
It’s up to sign people to help clients see it differently. As Mike Meyer [Mike Meyer Sign Painter, Chester, Iowa] often tells customers, “You’ll make more on this sign than I will.”
This appeared in the September/October 2014 issue of SignCraft.
PVC letters on ¼-in. PVC panel mounted on 1-in. PVC background. Mountains and letter shadows are a digital print. All the paint on these signs is Matthews paint, and the digital prints were done on a Seiko printer. This sign was done in 2001.
Digital print done on Seiko printer on painted ¼-in. PVC panel mounted on ¾-in. PVC background. This sign was done prior to 2001.
Layers of painted PVC with a digital print
Letters are painted PVC with an airbrushed fade also done with Matthews paint, on a digital print mounted on PVC. Tire is cutout PVC with a digital print. Secondary copy is painted PVC on a wood background; mountains are painted PVC.
Painted PVC letters with digital print fade, on painted PVC panel. Cat is a digital print on PVC. “I shaped HDU for the trim,” says Randy, “then cut gashes in it with a hand grinder and faux finished it. I made an acrylic template to look like annual rings on the CNC router, then put that on the end of each trim board and hit that with a hammer to emboss the HDU.”
High density urethane over overlaid plywood core, 3-ft. in diameter; painted ¼-in. PVC letters on ¾-in. PVC outline and engine-turned 23K gold leaf on the crown
Painted ¾-in. PVC letters on layered PVC panel. Secondary copy is painted PVC with painted acrylic letters. Oval graphic is HDU panel on router-cut PVC with an inset aluminum panel that is leafed with palladium leaf.
