Flex banner vs roll-up standee: which one does the job?

The short answer

If there is a wall, a gate, a railing or a frame to fix it to, and the print will stay there for the duration, order a flex banner. If the print has to stand on a floor, move between venues, or be set up by one person in a minute, order a roll-up standee. For an exhibition stand or a shop entrance you will often want both: a banner as the backdrop and a standee at the entrance.

What a flex banner is

Flex is a PVC-coated fabric printed with solvent or eco-solvent inks, which is why it survives outdoors. It is supplied as a flat sheet, hemmed at the edges, with metal eyelets at intervals so it can be tied with rope or cable ties to a frame, railing, scaffold or gate. It is printed by the square foot, so a very large banner is still inexpensive, and it can be made in almost any size.

What it cannot do is stand up. A banner needs a structure, and if the venue does not have one you will be tying it to whatever is there or hiring a frame. It also wrinkles if folded for storage, so between events it should be rolled. Outdoors, wind is the enemy: a large banner on a fence acts as a sail, and a banner meant for a windy site should have wind slits cut or be mounted on a rigid frame.

What a roll-up standee is

A roll-up standee is a printed sheet, usually on a stiff synthetic film rather than flex, attached to a spring-loaded aluminium base. Pull the print up, clip the pole in, and it stands on its own. Let it down and it rolls into the base, which goes into a carry bag that fits in a car boot or an overhead locker. Standard sizes are around three feet wide by six feet tall, and the print is seen from the front only.

The base is the cost and also the point. A standee is more expensive per square foot than a banner because you are buying a mechanism, but it can be set up anywhere with a flat floor and taken down in seconds, and the print can be swapped for a new one when the message changes. It is an indoor product: outdoors it blows over, and the mechanism does not like rain.

Choosing by venue

Walk through the venue in your head. A shop shutter, a school gate, a building site, a stage backdrop, a wedding entrance: these have something to hang from and want a banner. A hotel lobby, a conference registration desk, a mall activation, a showroom, a college seminar: these have a floor and no wall you may use, and want a standee.

The number of events matters too. A banner is printed for one place and one message; at the next event you will print another. A standee base is reusable, so a business that attends several events a year buys the base once and replaces only the print, which over a season costs less than a new banner each time.

• Outdoors, or anywhere there is a frame or railing: flex banner
• Indoors on a floor, no fixing allowed: roll-up standee
• One-off event, large area to cover: flex banner
• Several events a year, same footprint: roll-up standee with replacement prints
• Exhibition stand: banner as backdrop, standee at the front

Design differences

A banner is read from a distance and often at speed, so the design should be one message, one image and a few words in a type size readable from across a road. A standee is read by someone standing beside it, so it can carry more: a headline at eye level, supporting text below it, contact details near the bottom. On a standee the lowest fifteen centimetres or so curl into the base and are partly hidden, so keep anything important above that.

Both are printed at large sizes, so artwork does not need to be 300 DPI at full size. Supply vector artwork where possible, or a raster file at 100 to 150 DPI at final size, and keep any photograph as large as you have it. Colours should be in CMYK, and a solid dark background will show every crease on flex, so lighter backgrounds age better on a banner that will be rolled and reused.

What to send

The finished size, in feet or millimetres, stated explicitly. A PDF with fonts outlined, or a high-resolution image at final size. For a banner, say whether it will hang outdoors and for how long, because that changes the material and whether wind slits are advisable. For a standee, say whether you already own a base and want a replacement print only, which is a different product from a complete unit.

Common questions