Most people who search for UV printing are not actually shopping for a printing process. They want a specific object: a lobby panel for a suite on Ventura, a parking sign that survives a summer, a window display for a brokerage, a business card that someone notices in a handshake. UV is just how the ink gets to be permanent on a hard surface. The decision that matters is which hard surface.
We run UV printing at the shop in Sun Valley, about ten minutes over the hill from Sherman Oaks on the 170 or the 101. Acrylic printing starts at $90, and you set size and quantity in the configurator. What follows is the conversation we have with people before the file goes to the press, because picking the wrong substrate is the expensive mistake here — not picking the wrong printer.
What "UV" is actually describing
Conventional ink dries. It soaks into paper and the solvent leaves. UV ink does not dry at all — it cures. Lamps over the print head hit each pass with ultraviolet light and the liquid turns solid in a fraction of a second, bonded to whatever it landed on.
Two consequences follow from that, and they are the whole reason this process exists. First, the ink never needs to be absorbed, so it prints on things that absorb nothing: acrylic, aluminum, PVC, coated board, glass. Second, since the surface is solid the moment it leaves the press, a panel can be cut, drilled, mounted or stacked immediately instead of sitting in a rack off-gassing.
That instant cure is also what lets us build ink upward instead of only sideways — printing the same area again and again until you can feel it with a thumb. That is the trick behind raised varnish, which comes up later.
Second-surface acrylic, and why the artwork gets reversed
Clear acrylic can be printed on the front face or the back face, and the difference is not a preference. It changes what the sign looks like and how long it stays looking that way.
Second surface means the artwork is printed in reverse on the back of the sheet, then backed with white ink, so the viewer is looking through an eighth or a quarter inch of clear material at the image. The color sits under glass, essentially. Depth, gloss, saturated blacks — and the ink cannot be scratched, because there is a slab of acrylic between it and the world. Anything cleaned daily by staff with a spray bottle should be printed this way.
First surface means ink on the front. You want it when the panel has to sit flush against a wall with no gap, when the back is going to be adhered to glass, or when you want a matte finish instead of the wet gloss that second-surface printing produces. The trade is that the ink is exposed and a fingernail or an abrasive wipe will eventually find it.
Weight is worth a thought too. Quarter-inch acrylic at a large size is genuinely heavy, and standoffs going into drywall in a leased suite need the right anchors — or a stud. If the panel is going up in a building where you are a tenant, find out what the landlord allows you to drill before you order the size.
Dibond for anything that goes outside
Dibond aluminum starts at $37.42 and it is the default answer for exterior rigid signage. It is an aluminum composite: two thin aluminum skins bonded either side of a polyethylene core. The result is flat, stiff, weather-indifferent and light for its rigidity.
What it does not do is the point. It has no flutes, so it cannot bow along its ribs the way corrugated plastic does in the heat. It does not flex and dish like thin styrene. It does not chalk. UV ink bonds to the white coil coating on the face, and the panel stays a panel — which matters for anything mounted where being slightly warped reads as cheap: a suite identification plate by an entrance, a parking or tow-away panel in a lot, a panel behind standoffs on a stucco frontage, a wall-mounted directory.
Sun exposure is still sun exposure. A west-facing storefront on Ventura takes a hard three hours of afternoon light every day of the year, and no ink is exempt from that. Magentas and reds shift first, yellows next; blacks, deep blues and greens hold longest. If your brand color is a bright red and the sign faces west, know that going in and plan a replacement cycle rather than being surprised by one.
Foam board is an indoor material, full stop
Foam board starts at $28.30 and it is excellent at exactly one category of work: interior graphics that need to be large, flat, light and cheap. Easel signs in a waiting room, presentation boards, window displays sitting behind glass, event and open-house boards, a price wall behind a counter.
It is paper faced over a polystyrene foam core, which means a fingernail dents it, the cut edges fluff if they get handled a lot, and humidity will eventually separate the face from the core. Put it outdoors and it curls — not in a month, in an afternoon of real weather. People discover this by taping a foam board sign to a sandwich frame on the sidewalk and finding a taco shell by closing time.
So the honest rule is that foam board is for graphics that live under a roof and get replaced when the message changes. If a panel needs to be there in a year, in the same condition, it wants to be Dibond or acrylic instead, and paying four times as much once is cheaper than paying a quarter as much five times.
Raised spot UV on business cards
Raised Spot UV business cards start at $64.67, and the default run is 50 pieces at $1.29 each. The finish is clear varnish printed on top of the card in registered layers and cured hard, so your mark has actual relief you can feel — glossy, dimensional, sitting proud of the sheet.
It needs a second file from you, and this is where most jobs stall. Alongside the artwork, send a spot mask: the same document, same size, same position, with solid 100% black filling exactly the shapes that should be raised and nothing anywhere else. Not a highlight, not a tint, not a layer effect — a shape.
Contrast sells it. Raised gloss on a matte dark card is dramatic because the light catches the varnish and nothing else. Raised gloss on a busy full-color background is largely invisible, because there is no quiet field for the shine to interrupt.
Keep the shapes substantial. Hairline rules, fine serifs and type much below seven points do not hold a clean raise — the varnish wants a little area to build on. Logos, a heavy last name, a rule under a title, a pattern: those work.
Leave the writing surface alone. Do not put varnish where a pen has to go or where a stamp lands. Gloss does not take ink.
The Sherman Oaks part of the job
Two things about this specific stretch of the Valley shape the orders we see. One is that a lot of Sherman Oaks business happens in multi-tenant buildings — office floors along Ventura, suites above retail, medical and dental practices sharing a lobby and a directory. Those buildings usually have a sign program, which means a specified panel size, a specified mounting method, and a property manager who has to approve it. Ask for that spec sheet before you order anything, because a beautiful panel in the wrong dimension is scrap.
The other is that the street-level frontage is a walking street in a way most of the Valley is not. People are on foot outside a boutique or a restaurant, close to the glass, standing still. That changes the material math: at three feet, gloss, edge quality and the depth of second-surface acrylic are all visible, and a slightly soft image is visible too. Drive-by signage can be printed at 100 ppi and nobody knows. Something read from two feet away cannot.
If you are working out what a storefront or suite actually needs, our UV printing in Sherman Oaks page lays out the substrates side by side with what each one costs.
Files for rigid work
Build the file at final size in CMYK, with fonts outlined and bleed all around — and tell us the finished dimensions in inches even if the file is in points, because a rigid panel has no tolerance to reflow into.
Keep critical copy well inside the trim, and account for hardware. Standoff holes, grommets and a frame's channel all eat into the panel, and a phone number that ends a quarter inch from the edge will end up half behind an aluminum lip.
For clear acrylic, be explicit about white. White ink is a printed layer, not an assumption: whatever you do not flag for white will read as a window onto the wall behind it. Decide element by element which parts are opaque and which parts you want to see through, and say so — it is much faster to answer that question now than to look at a proof and wonder why the logo has gone ghostly.
Angels Print does UV printing on acrylic, Dibond aluminum, foam board and card stock at 8511 Lankershim Blvd in Sun Valley, for businesses in Sherman Oaks and across the San Fernando Valley. If your artwork and dimensions are settled, choose your material and size and order online. If you are still deciding between second-surface acrylic and Dibond for a frontage, or you have a building sign spec you want read through before you commit to a size, call us at (818) 806-9006 or bring the file into the shop and we will work it out with you at the counter.