Signs Now Brand Guidelines: An Austin Sign Shop of 1983 Inside Alliance Franchise Brands

A sign shop, then a franchise company.

Signs Now dates its story to 1983, when, the company says, a single sign shop opened in Austin, Texas. Its own timeline gives 1986 as the year Signs Now Corporation was formed, and the brand’s current pages describe it as “founded in 1986,” so two dates run through its own material: 1983 for the first shop and 1986 for the franchising company that grew out of it.

Growth came quickly by the company’s account. It says the twenty-fifth franchised location opened in 1989, with the fiftieth soon after, and that the number of United States locations doubled to 100 in 1990, the year Successful Magazine placed Signs Now seventh in its “Franchise Gold 100,” according to the company. It says it crossed into Canada in 1991 and that its opening centre in the United Kingdom followed in 1994, which made Signs Now a three-country network within about a decade of the Austin shop.

The Canadian trademarks register gives an outside, dated view of those early years. Signs Now Corporation filed its “Signs Now” word-and-design mark in Canada in July 1991, and the mark was registered in July 1994, covering two services: franchising support for the setting up and running of sign-making centres, and the custom manufacture of signs for others. The register lists the original owner as Signs Now Corporation of Mobile, Alabama. A change recorded with effect from the end of 1996 moved the mark to Signs Now Corporation, a Florida corporation based in Bradenton, Florida, the address the register then kept until 2005. The registered mark is a design built from a circle and triangular forms, and the register notes that the word “signs” on its own is not claimed as exclusive.

Signs, wraps and window graphics for businesses.

The company grew by buying as well as franchising. Its timeline says it acquired another sign franchisor, The Signery, in 1995, and completed a second acquisition of a sign franchise system in 1997. In 1995, it says, Entrepreneur International listed Signs Now among its “World’s Top 200 Franchisers,” and in 2000 Success Magazine placed it in the top ten of its “Franchise Gold 200.”

What a Signs Now centre sells is set out in plain terms by its parent. Alliance Franchise Brands lists digital imaging for outdoor and indoor signage, exhibit and vehicle graphics, magnetic signs, banners, window graphics, way-finding and ADA signage, dimensional letters and directional systems. Franchise owners, in the parent’s words, act as business consultants on how graphics can carry a client’s brand, image and marketing messages. That is the language of a business-to-business shop: the customer is usually a company that needs a storefront sign, a lobby wall or a set of lettered vans, and the work is made to carry someone else’s identity rather than the franchise’s own.

The brand’s franchise page adds detail on how the centres run. It says centres keep weekday business hours, and that a new owner can buy an existing, equipped centre, start a new franchise from scratch, or convert an existing sign or print business to the brand. The support it lists includes initial and on-site training, sales coaching, a vetted list of equipment vendors, and marketing programmes such as direct mail, search marketing, email and social media. Each centre is independently owned and operated, the site says, and individual centres decide whether they take on electrical or installation work.

Programmes followed through the 2000s, the company says: the Signs Now Signature Fund, a community programme run with franchise owners, in 2007; a MatchMaker programme to streamline franchise development in 2008; a Green Initiative in 2010 to promote what it called “green” sign-making technology among its members; and an Advantage Program in 2011 aimed at existing independent sign companies.

Design and documentation.

Sign, print and promotional-products franchises sell mostly to other businesses, through local centres run by franchisees under a shared name. Their identity is carried less by national advertising than by the surfaces the centres themselves produce: shop windows, vehicle wraps and reception displays. When Signarama renewed its colour scheme, logo, tagline and icon in 2014, Signs of the Times reported that the new look would be applied to exactly those three things across its franchise locations.

The photography such companies publish tends to show the same surfaces: storefronts with the brand name across the fascia, vans in full wraps, and finished signs installed on clients’ buildings, much of it carrying the client’s name rather than the franchise’s own. Individual centres are commonly identified by the town or district they serve, so one national name is repeated across hundreds of locations, and in some markets a network trades under a different name altogether, as FASTSIGNS does in Australia, where English Wikipedia says its centres operate as Signwave.

Service menus tend to be written plainly, as lists of what a centre can make and do: signs and banners, vehicle graphics, interior décor, wayfinding, digital signs, printed material and branded merchandise, often with design, permitting and installation alongside. The menus have widened over time; FASTSIGNS, which began with next-day cut-vinyl signs in 1985, now describes a much broader range of visual communications.

Behind the storefronts sit corporate pages about owners and franchise systems. Some networks belong to private-equity firms and have changed hands several times; others remain in family control, as the Titus family’s United Franchise Group does with Signarama. Location counts are given by date and by source, and they vary, because centres open, close, convert from independent shops or share premises with related franchises.

From Bradenton to the Alliance group.

The brand changed hands in 2005. Signs Now says Signs Now Corporation was acquired that year by Allegra Network LLC, a print and graphic communications franchisor, and the Canadian register records the “Signs Now” mark passing from the Florida company to Allegra Holdings LLC, of Northville, Michigan, with effect from 31 January 2005. From then on the sign brand sat inside a group whose roots were in printing.

The same register traces later reshuffles inside that group. The mark moved to Sign & Graphics Holdings LLC with effect from the end of 2016, merged back into Allegra Holdings in December 2019, and in June 2020 Allegra Holdings changed its name to AFB IP Holdings LLC, of Plymouth, Michigan. The mark was renewed in 2024.

Today the brand sits in the Sign & Graphics Group of Alliance Franchise Brands, alongside Image360 and Signs By Tomorrow, while the group’s Marketing & Print side runs Allegra, Insty-Prints and American Speedy Printing in the United States. Alliance describes itself as the franchisor of more than 500 locations in North America across all of its brands, and the Signs Now site says the brand serves customers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The Signs Now website now carries the Alliance Franchise Brands copyright line.

For a design guide, Signs Now shows how a sign franchise presents a trade that is mostly made for other companies’ brands: a short, direct name, a service menu of signs, wraps and window graphics, and a parent group that keeps several sign brands side by side. Compare Image360, its sister brand in the same group, and Allegra, the print brand of the group that bought Signs Now in 2005. For this guide we use a deep teal, warm amber and board white with a bold grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Signs Now’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.