A banner can be made of many different materials, although these can typically be grouped into one of two categories, vinyl banners and cloth banners. When choosing the right material for your banner, you need to consider the conditions and length of use to ensure that you have the right material for your uses.
A vinyl banner is typically the cheaper of the two types. These were traditionally made by sticking large vinyl stickers onto a single colour backing sheet of vinyl, and indeed many smaller sign manufacturers still use this process. It has advantages in the cost and lowered equipment requirements, but greatly restricts the designs available. Larger sign manufactures now use a banner printer to manufacture vinyl signs, which has the greatest flexibility and reproducibility but requires large and expensive specialist printers on site. A good vinyl banner will have UV resistant inks, be hemmed via heat welding or sewing to protect the edges from fraying, and will have metal gromits inserted at regular intervals to allow the banner to be hung or pinned without damage to the banner.
Vinyl banners are the most common banner in use, with fabric banners being reserved for more specialist uses. High quality vinyl banners are very durable and suitable for long term outside use, while still being cheaper than most cloth banners to manufacture.
However, a cloth banner is the environmentally friendly option, and is suitable for use where a banner is needed in the long term and the purchaser wishes to spend a premium for specialised fabrics and usually small scale production processes. A cloth banner can be made from a number of different fabrics, including cotton, canvas, satin, hemp, nylon and even organza. The manufacturing process for a cloth banner is very different from a vinyl banner.
The closest process is appliqué, where letters and designs are cut from contrasting fabric and sewn onto the banner base fabric. This is a very time consuming and manual process, and like the sticker process used on a vinyl banner has limitations on what can be achieved and the ability to reproduce the banner.
The next process possible is silk screen printing, which uses a silk screen rather than only being suitable to use on silk. For silk screen printing, the design is drawn onto the screen and areas which are not to be coloured are masked, and then dye is painted over the screen and passes through to the fabric underneath. This process is again very manual and time consuming, but allows for consistent reproduction of very detailed designs, and can incorporate several colours of dye .
The final technique used for cloth banners is dye sublimation, which uses special dyes and paper. The design is made on the computer and then printed onto the paper using the special dyes. The printed paper is then laid over the banner material, and is then placed in a special heat press. The heat and pressure cause the dyes to sublimate into a gas and pass into the fabric, creating a perfect copy of the printed design.