Custom Signs in Tyler, TX

Handmade wooden signs for Tyler — house names and numbers for the historic districts, and shopfront signage that suits a building older than the business inside it.

Sixty thousand people walk these streets every spring

The Azalea and Spring Flower Trail runs from mid-March to mid-April and takes visitors along roughly ten miles of historic homes and residential gardens. Around sixty thousand people come through. They walk past front doors, gates, porches and shopfronts, and they look at everything — that is the entire point of the trail.

Which makes Tyler unusual. In most towns a house name or number is for the postman. Here, for a month a year, it is on display to a crowd, and a hand-cut timber piece on a Tudor or Craftsman frontage reads very differently from a plastic number screwed beside the door.

House numbers and names for district homes

This is the most-asked-for sign work in the historic districts: numbers and house names cut and painted to suit the period of the building rather than the aisle of a hardware store. Tudor, Colonial Revival, Spanish Revival and Craftsman all want something different, and getting the lettering and the depth right is most of the job.

Send a photograph of the frontage. The brick or stucco color, the porch shadow and the mounting height decide what will actually read from the pavement, and that is not something to guess at.

Made in a furniture shop

These are timber pieces, not printing. Real frames, real boards, joints cut rather than stapled, and a finish put on the way a table gets finished. That is why they survive outdoors through an East Texas summer, and why they sit properly against old brick instead of floating in front of it.

Shopfronts and the square

Downtown Tyler carries forty-six Half Mile of History markers around the square, and the businesses trading in those buildings are exactly who a made sign suits. A printed panel on a hundred-year-old frontage always looks like what it is. Exterior signs are built for outdoors rather than being an indoor sign hung outside — tell us how exposed the spot is and it gets made for that.

Coat racks, and the rest of it

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. They take lettering too. Alongside those: family names and established dates, scripture, kitchen and laundry wording, nursery pieces, wedding and anniversary signs, and memorial pieces for a family place.

Ordering from Tyler

Send the wording, the rough size and a photograph of where it is going. You get a price before anything is cut. Tyler is about forty minutes from the shop, so delivery is straightforward, and one sign for one room is a perfectly normal order.

Questions we get from Tyler