Double Sided Banner Printing in Los Angeles: Blockout, Mirroring and Where the Second Side Pays for Itself

The question arrives almost word for word every week: can you print both sides of a banner. The answer is yes, and it has been yes for as long as we have run wide-format, but the useful conversation is the one underneath it. There are two different ways to build a double-sided banner, they cost different money, and one of them fails in a way that is invisible in the shop and obvious the moment the banner is hanging over a driveway on Lankershim with afternoon sun behind it. If you are hanging something people will approach from two directions, this is what we go through before the file goes to print.

The problem is light, not ink

A vinyl banner is translucent. Print one side, hold it up to the sun, and you can read it from the back — reversed, ghostly, but legible. Print a second image on the back of that same sheet and the two now compete: your logo shows through the phone number, dark blocks on one face bleed into light areas on the other, and the whole thing reads muddy from both sides. This is the single thing that separates a real double-sided banner from a banner with printing on the back.

The fix is a blockout layer. Either the material itself has an opaque grey or black core sandwiched between two white print faces, or we print two separate banners and laminate them together with an opaque liner in the middle. Both work. Single-sheet blockout vinyl is lighter, hangs flatter and is the default for most jobs. The laminated build is heavier and stiffer, which is an advantage on a banner that hangs free and gets handled a lot, and it is the route we take when a customer wants two very different designs at full ink coverage on either face. Our double sided banner starts at $63.80, and that price assumes the blockout construction — it is not the same product as a single-sided banner with a second pass added.

13 oz, 18 oz, and when the weight matters

Standard banner vinyl is 13 oz scrim — polyester mesh laminated between two vinyl faces. It is the correct default for the large majority of outdoor banners: it takes the ink well, it handles rain, and it is light enough that ordinary grommets and zip ties hold it. Blockout versions of 13 oz exist and are what most double-sided work is printed on.

Eighteen ounce is a heavier, stiffer scrim, and it earns its cost in three situations. A banner that spans more than about ten feet unsupported between two poles. A banner in a wind-exposed corridor — anything facing an open boulevard, a parking structure gap or a canyon mouth. And a banner that gets installed and taken down repeatedly, because the failure point on a reusable banner is always the hem around the grommets, and heavier material simply survives more cycles. If the banner goes up once for a weekend event and comes down, 13 oz is not a compromise.

Where the second side actually pays for itself

Ask where people are when they read it. A banner flat against a wall or a fence has one visible face, and paying for a second is money spent on the bricks behind it. The banners that genuinely need both faces are the ones hanging perpendicular to how people travel: suspended from a bracket over a sidewalk, hung between two poles in a lot people drive through in both directions, strung across an entrance, or mounted on a frame in the middle of an open space like a fairground or a parking-lot event.

There is a second, less obvious case. A single-sided banner over a walkway does not just fail to communicate from the back — it looks unfinished, because what people see is a grey scrim underside. On anything hung at eye level or above where the back is visible at all, we will usually suggest at least a simple logo-and-phone-number treatment on the second face rather than leaving it blank.

Mirroring, and the file error we catch most

On a double-sided banner the back is not the front duplicated. If your banner has an arrow, a "parking in rear," a "entrance this way," or any directional element, that element has to flip on the second face — because the person reading the back is standing on the opposite side and the direction they need to go is now the other way. We flag it when we can tell, but we cannot always tell: a banner that says "turn here" with an arrow could plausibly be correct either way depending on the site.

Related, and easier to get wrong quietly: text alignment. If the front has the logo hard left and the back has it hard left too, the two logos sit at opposite ends of the banner. That is fine, sometimes intentional, and occasionally the reason a customer tells us the finished banner "doesn't match." Send both faces as clearly labelled artboards or separate files — front and back, not page 1 and page 2 — and tell us if the back is meant to be a mirror or an independent design.

Hems, grommets and the hardware that actually fails

Every outdoor banner should be hemmed. A hem is a folded and welded edge that doubles the material where the stress lives, and an unhemmed banner tears at the grommets in the first serious wind. Grommets every two feet along the top and bottom is the working standard, with one in each corner; going tighter than that on a long banner is cheap insurance and going looser is how a banner ends up flapping from three of its six attachment points.

For a banner on a pole or a hanging bracket, pole pockets are better than grommets — a sewn sleeve top and bottom that a rod slides through, which spreads the load along the whole edge instead of concentrating it at eight holes. Say up front which mounting you are using, because the pocket has to be added at finishing and the depth depends on your rod diameter. And use bungee cords or zip ties rather than rope pulled bar-tight: a banner needs to move a little, and one tensioned like a drumhead transfers every gust straight into the grommets.

Wind slits do not do what people think

Someone will suggest cutting half-moon slits in the face to "let the wind through." We do not recommend it. The openings are far too small a fraction of the surface to meaningfully reduce load, and every slit is a tear waiting to propagate across a printed face. If wind is the real concern, the answers are heavier material, mesh banner vinyl with actual perforation across the whole field, a smaller banner, or better mounting — not slits in a solid sheet.

Rules worth checking before you print

Temporary banner signage in the City of Los Angeles generally requires a permit when it goes up on a commercial property, with limits on size, duration and how many times a year you can display one, and the surrounding cities — Burbank, Glendale, San Fernando, plus unincorporated county areas — each run their own version of those rules. Landlords and property managers frequently layer their own restrictions on top. None of this changes what we print; it changes what size you should order and how long you can leave it up. Planning a message across several locations is the kind of thing our outdoor advertising work covers, and anything intended to stay up permanently belongs in signage and front signs instead of a banner.

When a banner is the wrong product

A banner is temporary by construction. If the thing you are hanging is your actual storefront identification and it is still there in two years, it has stopped being a banner and started being a sign that looks like one — sun-faded, sagging at the grommets, and reading as a business that never got around to it. Permanent interior and exterior identification is what acrylic business signs from $46.76 and full-face acrylic printing from $90 are for.

And if the message you want on both sides is really a daily sidewalk message — today's special, open, sale — a banner is the wrong tool entirely. An A-frame sidewalk sign from $94.99 is double-sided by definition, stands on its own without hardware, comes in at night, and takes a new insert when the message changes.

Sizing and legibility

The most common outdoor sizes we run are 2×4, 3×6, 4×8 and 3×10 feet, and the right one comes from reading distance, not from wall space. The working rule is about one inch of capital letter height per ten feet of distance — so a banner read from across a four-lane boulevard, call it eighty feet, needs eight-inch caps on the one thing you want remembered. That is one line of text, maybe two. Everything else on the banner is for the person already standing in front of it.

Send vector artwork — PDF, AI, EPS or SVG — built at final size with fonts outlined. Raster is fine at 100–150 dpi at final size for a banner viewed from ten feet or more. Keep text at least two inches inside the edge so nothing lands in the hem, specify colors in CMYK or by Pantone reference rather than by what your screen showed, and remember that on a double-sided job the hem eats from both faces equally.

Angels Print prints double-sided and single-sided vinyl banners, sidewalk A-frames and acrylic panels at our shop at 8511 Lankershim Blvd in Sun Valley, for storefronts, events, contractors and property managers across the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles. If your artwork is ready, configure size, hemming, grommets and quantity and order online. If you are still deciding between blockout and laminated construction, 13 oz and 18 oz, or whether the back of your banner needs a full design or just a logo, call us at (818) 806-9006 or come by the shop — we will hang a sample up to the light so you can see the show-through for yourself before you commit.