Custom Signs in Longview, TX

Handmade wooden signs, shop signage and coat racks for Longview — built as real timber pieces in the Kilgore shop, not printed onto something thin.

A downtown full of independents that need signage

Downtown Longview has spent years filling back up. The old hardware stores, banks and warehouses now hold a craft brewery, a coffee shop, restaurants, boutiques and a children's museum, and the district sits inside the Arts!Longview Cultural District alongside three museums, the public library and Kilgore College's downtown campus. There is something on most weekends — Downtown Live, ArtWalk, the Wine Swirl, cruise nights, the farmers market, the Christmas parade.

Every one of those independents needs to be identified from the pavement, and a printed panel on a hundred-year-old brick frontage always looks like what it is. A painted timber board with real depth to it belongs on those buildings.

There is grant money for exactly this

Worth knowing if you trade downtown: the DARE grant — Downtown Artistic Revitalization and Exterior Improvement — is funded by One Hundred Acres of Heritage, the non-profit behind Downtown Longview, and it exists to help businesses add color and artistic work to the outside of their building, or repair what is there. Applications are taken while funds last, through Visit Longview at 109 West Tyler Street.

We have no involvement in that program and no arrangement with them. But a hand-made exterior sign is the kind of thing it was written for, and most owners we meet have never heard of it. Ask them before you pay for signage out of your own pocket.

Made in a furniture shop, and it shows

These come out of a shop that builds tables, and it is obvious when you handle one. Real frames, real boards, joints that are cut rather than stapled, and a finish put on the way a table gets finished. That is why they survive on a porch through an East Texas summer, and why they sit properly next to good furniture instead of looking like gift shop stock.

What people ask for

Shop names and trading boards. Market stall signage. Laundry and kitchen wording. Family names and established dates. House numbers. Scripture. Nursery and children's room pieces. Wedding and anniversary signs. Memorial pieces for a family place. One sign for one room is a perfectly normal order, and so is a set for a whole shopfront.

Coat racks and hooks

A close cousin of the sign work and one of the most-asked-for things in the shop. A stained board with cast hooks, cut to the length of wall you actually have, sorts out a back door or a mudroom that never had anywhere to hang anything. They take lettering too, which makes them a sign and a coat rack at once. They also sell well in a shop as stock.

Ordering one from Longview

Send the wording, the rough size and any colors it has to live alongside. A photograph of the wall or the shopfront helps far more than a description does. You get a price before anything is cut, and Longview is a twenty-minute run so delivery is easy.

Questions we get from Longview