Building signage is of course incredibly important in helping customers and clients find you and establishing trust in your business. But once they’ve walked through the door, your office interior can have a huge impact on customers’ perception of the quality of service. Treat your logo right with a sleek and professional lobby or reception sign. If you are on the market for a sign that will transform your office interior, here is all of the information you need to make the decision that’s right for your business.
Popular Interior Office Sign Options
When it comes to traditional signage for your office interior, you have several options for the material and style. Which you select depends upon placement, your logo, and the overall feel that you’re going for in your office space. Here are the most popular options for lobby signs and reception signs:
Cut Dibond Office Signs
Strongest Selling Point: Can be cut to intricate shapes without any bending or bowing.
Works Great For: Sleek, typographic signage
Dibond is the brand name of the leading supplier of composite aluminum paneling. We love working with Dibond for its light weight, sleek appearance, high resistance to warping (it’s the flattest panel on the market!), and its ability to be cut with intricate detail. Because Dibond retains its shape so well, it can be trimmed with incredible detail, like the kind you’d need to create free-floating typographic signs.
Since many business and company logos consist of lettering, Dibond is a great option for interior signage. And while the minimalist, monochromatic look of Dibond can certainly stand by itself, you are not limited to this single color. Dibond signs can also be printed with photos and graphic designs, giving your images bold colors and a striking metallic look.
Acrylic Office Signs
Strongest Selling Point: All that’s attractive about glass at a fraction of the price and with 100x the durability.
Works Great For: Translucent, mounted prints
As beautiful as blasted glass prints are, they sure are impractical. Not only are they incredibly expensive and unforgiving to produce and trim, they are heavy, delicate, and require excessive cleaning to keep dust, dirt, and fingerprints from soiling the image. Luckily, acrylic prints make for an equally attractive and infinitely more user-friendly option for office signs.
Acrylic is a composite thermoplastic material onto which graphics can be transferred. Acrylic has a number of advantages: it is impervious to moisture, lightweight, durable, has enough structural integrity to be cut to different shapes, and can accept a wide spectrum of ink colors such that the prints look incredibly bright and beautiful. An acrylic office sign can either be printed with a full image, so that the entire panel is covered in ink, or with a transparent background.
We highly recommend acrylic panels to achieve an almost futuristic, floating look. Acrylic has a very modern aesthetic, especially because it does not need to be framed. Acrylic prints generally come with polished metal standoffs that mount the image an inch or two from the wall.
Aluminum Office Signs
Strongest Selling Point: Super thin and flat, so that the print lies almost seamlessly onto a desk or wall surface
Works Great For: Mounting to a reception desk
While acrylic and Dibond office signs are generally mounted with about an inch of space between the print and the wall, aluminum panels are meant to lie flat against a surface. This seamless look is especially desirable for continuous shapes or lettering. Because aluminum paneling is so thin and lightweight, it can lie so flat against your reception desk that guests may even think the image was printed directly onto the surface itself. Aluminum is also a highly attractive material that can be printed with bright colors and diffuses light much more pleasantly than glass or acrylic: aluminum prints will glow rather than glare.
Dimensional Lettering
Strongest Selling Point: 3D aesthetic that shows shadows and perspective
Works Great For: Mounting typography onto surfaces from contrasting materials
Rather than the floating or inlaid look of the former sign materials, dimensional lettering allows for your lobby or reception signs to have a 3D aesthetic. Typically printed on durable indoor sign materials like Ultra Board or PVC Sintra Board, dimensional lettering looks best for logos that consist of solid shapes and colors. These signs look sleek and attractive mounted to desks, walls, and doors, especially when the surface material provides contrast. The 3D, plastic composite material will really pop against backgrounds made of stone, wood, or other natural materials.
Alternative Interior Office Signs Ideas
When creating reception signs or lobby signs for your office, you are not at all limited to a single material or style. By printing branded imagery onto a variety of mediums in complementary styles, you can create an experiential design for your business. And by using permanent office signs in for purposes other than just your logo and reception, you can establish a higher degree of professional authority and polish across your entire office.
Strong Branding through Mixed Media Lobby Signs
There is a lot more to your brand than just the logo. Displaying graphics and prints relevant to your products and services can have a powerful effect on strengthening these associations with your brand. Take our client Lilly for example: the name and logo “Lilly” by itself may not necessarily mean much to a general audience. But combined with a colorful montage including images of medical research and the history of medicine and technology, it is much easier to make the cognitive leap to understanding Lilly as a long-running pharmaceutical company.
Another example is our client Drake Integrations: it is not necessarily clear what their services are from the name and logo alone. But by placing their logo on an aluminum panel next to artistic prints of energy control systems framed by piping, it can be better understood that they design and engineer integrated building systems. Furthermore, by treating the prints as art, Drake Integrations can reinforce the skillful craftsmanship that their work involves.
Banish Paper Signs & Notices
Investing the time and money into proper, attractive signs for your office or business helps subliminally command respect from your customers and employees. If you need to post rules or notices to keep everyone informed, a proper sign carries much more authority than a wimpy piece of paper that you typed in Microsoft Word and posted with tape. Compare, for instance, the acrylic signs that our client Crunch uses to inform gym members about their policies…
…with the following paper sign in an office breakroom:
