Banners are priced by the square foot. $6 here, hemmed and grommeted, which means the size decision is also the price decision. It’s worth five minutes of thought, because the failure mode is specific and predictable: people order one size down to save money, discover it can’t be read from where people actually stand, and order a second one.
Step one: measure the space, not the idea
Go outside with a tape measure. Measure the railing, the fence section, the wall between the windows, the gap between the two poles. Write it down. This single step prevents the most common problem we see, which is a perfectly good banner that doesn’t fit where it was meant to go.
Leave yourself a few inches on each side for tie-downs. A banner that’s exactly as wide as the railing has nowhere to attach.
Step two: how far away is the reader?
This decides your letter height, and letter height decides your banner size, not the other way around. The general rule people in signage use is roughly one inch of letter height for every 10 feet of viewing distance, with more if the reader is moving.
So: someone standing at a booth, ten feet away, can read one-inch letters. Someone across a parking lot at 100 feet needs ten-inch letters. Someone driving past at 40 mph needs more than that, and needs the message short enough to finish reading.
Work it backwards. Ten-inch letters plus a logo plus breathing room does not fit on a 2×4. That’s how you arrive at your size honestly.
The sizes people actually order
2×4 ft. $48. Table banners, small storefront windows, booth backdrops behind a table. Readable from across a room, not from the road.
3×6 ft. $108. The workhorse. Fits most fence sections and storefront fronts, readable across a parking lot. If you’re not sure, this is usually the answer.
3×8 ft. $144. The one we’d recommend most often for a business that wants to be read from a street. Thirty-six dollars more than a 3×6 buys a meaningful jump in visibility.
4×10 ft. $240. Grand openings, building fronts, anything competing with traffic. This is a sign, not a decoration.
Long and short. 2×10, 2×12. For railings, scaffolding, and fence lines where you have length but no height. Often the right shape when a conventional rectangle won’t fit.
How much to put on it
Less than you want to. A banner read from a moving car has about three seconds and room for roughly three things: who you are, what the offer or message is, and one way to act on it: a phone number, or an arrow, or a date.
Everything else you’re tempted to add makes the important parts smaller. If your banner has a paragraph on it, it’s a poster that got too big.
Hems, grommets, and wind
Hemming and grommeting are included at the posted price, and both matter more than they sound. Hems keep the edges from tearing in wind; grommets give you something to tie through that isn’t the vinyl itself. Never staple a banner through the middle of the material: the first gust will tear it from the staple.
If the banner is going somewhere genuinely windy (an exposed fence line, a construction site, anywhere with nothing blocking the valley wind) mention it. There are ways to build for that, including mesh, and it’s a conversation worth having before we print rather than after the banner has torn.
If it’s hanging from a pole rather than tied, ask for pole pockets instead of grommets. Different construction, same idea: attach to the finishing, not to the print.
Get your number in ten seconds
Width in feet, times height in feet, times $6. Or use the calculator, which does the same arithmetic and lets you compare materials. Then send the size and your artwork, in by 10:00 AM on a weekday and most banners are ready that afternoon.