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| • So what's the difference? Below is a comparison to precut alphabets and mylar stencils and hand painting. • For a comparison to vinyl letters, click here. |
Alphabet/Mylar- To hold the letter centers and larger areas in, bridges are required. These end up on your finished work and look amateurish- you'll have to go back and paint over them to make it look right. This is time consuming and is hard to blend in properly; or... |
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 SayWhat? masking stencils are entirely bridgeless, and take only one time through to paint. You save time, and the self adhesive feature reduces "bleed" under the stencil edge- your results look clean and polished. In fact, this is same process used by professional signmakers. |
| FONT CHOICES: Alphabet/Mylar- Because the fonts need to be customized for use with bridges, there is a limited number of letter styles and sizes to choose from. |
| We have over 44 popular fonts shown on our website, and we have thousands more available- plus we can use almost any Windows based font, as well as foreign characters (á, ä, é etc.), motifs, bullets- in fact almost anything that can be done with letters. And we will make the wording the EXACT size you need for your project; there's quite literally MILLIONS of options. |
TIME TO APPLY:
Alphabets- Difficult and time consuming to paint. To figure spacing you have to "dry run" the text several times or guesstimate your final length. Any mistakes and you have to start over. Each letter has to be painted one at a time, and commonly used letters have to be moved from place to place; ie: the word "everywhere" has 4 e's- you'd have to paint the first one, and then move the 'e' stencil to the next location and the next and the next....; 4 steps with this single letter in one word. Mylar stencils can be pre-spaced, but can only be cut up to about 30"-48" length, so several sections are usually needed to complete even one sentence. |
 Why is it so hard to figure spacing? Because just about every letter is a different size! At left is a simple example using a 3" capital S- not only are most of the letters different widths, the spacing between each letter (kerning) has to vary to make it look right. And it gets much more complicated with additional text and more complex fonts. It's almost impossible to figure the width of more than a few words without specialized computer programs or tedious trial and error. |
| All text is complete, pre-measured and spaced precisely to fit your wall area. There's almost no limit to the length- we've created projects over 300 ft long-and we can be accurate to less than 1/10th of an inch. Apply and paint- that's it. We can even cut curves, shadows, arches- just about any shape you can imagine... |
REUSABILITY:
Alphabets and Mylar- Can be reused multiple times. One point for them; or is it?... |
| Alphabet and Mylar stencils are generally more expensive; a complete upper and lower case alphabet stencil can cost from $50 to $150 and more. And rarely is wording repeated in the exact some size and font. However, In those instances you may wish to repeat the text, we offer substantial discounts on duplicate copies. We have many clients who use our stencils for crafts and signage and find them quite cost effective. And the significant time and effort saved, including no cleaning of the stencil required, will quickly add up, as well as knowing your project looks truly professional. |
Hand Painting- if you're already an expert calligrapher- go for it! It's beautiful and rewarding. However, if you're not, it takes months or years of practice to perfect, and even then is still time consuming, plus you're usually limited to just a few styles. Even professional signmakers rarely hand paint- they instead use a process like ours! Cutting your own- all the limitations of pre-cut alphabets, plus the additional pain of stencil cutting and cost of materials - you won't want to do it twice. Projection- works OK, but requires a darkened room, a good ($300+) overhead projector, and a lot of time and patience. Any movement of the projector will distort your lettering. You also need to set up the text in advance, usually using a transparency . In addition, it's hard to get a crisp edge without a great deal of practice. |
