Image360 Brand Guidelines: Signs By Tomorrow Roots & a 2013 Alliance Franchise Brand

A 1986 sign franchise and a new name in 2013.

Image360 is a sign and graphics franchise brand run by Alliance Franchise Brands of Plymouth, Michigan. Its roots lie in an older franchise, Signs By Tomorrow, which Alliance dates to 1986. Entrepreneur’s 2026 Franchise 500 directory lists Image360 itself as founded in 1986 and franchising since 1987, years that match the Signs By Tomorrow lineage rather than the 2013 Image360 name.

The Image360 name is much younger. Signs of the Times reported on 20 February 2013 that the ownership groups of two franchise companies had united under a new common parent, Alliance Franchise Brands LLC, with Mike Marcantonio as chief executive. One was Allegra Holdings, then the parent of the Allegra, Insty-Prints, American Speedy and Signs Now brands. The other was Sign and Graphics Holdings, which the magazine described as the parent of Signs By Tomorrow and “the new Image360 franchise brand.”

The new company was split into two divisions. A sign division, Sign & Graphic Brands, led by its president Ray Palmer, took in Signs Now, Signs By Tomorrow and Image360, with about 340 franchise members, the magazine reported; a marketing and print division, under its president Bob Milroy, gathered the Allegra network of Allegra, Insty-Prints and American Speedy Printing, with about 300 members of its own. Across both, Alliance counted nearly 650 franchise members in the United States, Canada and England at the time.

Image360 did not simply replace the older names. Signs By Tomorrow and Signs Now continued as separate brands: Alliance’s own sign and graphics page still lists both, each with a 1986 founding date, and a Signs of the Times report in June 2026 named them alongside Image360 in the Alliance family.

Signs, graphics and displays from one counter.

The idea behind the brand was breadth. In September 2016 Signs of the Times editor-in-chief Mark Kissling surveyed the sign franchises and quoted Ray Palmer, then president of Signs Now, Signs By Tomorrow and Image360, on the change. Alliance, he said, wanted to “open the market to viewing Image360 as a solutions provider versus a limited-offering company that only provides signage and quick-turn products.” At the time, the magazine noted, the Image360 website showed 16 signage products and 28 services aimed at 23 suggested industries.

Palmer also explained why the trade appealed to new owners: a business-to-business approach, low staff needs compared with food service, and ordinary business hours. He pointed to growing competition from print companies adding wide-format equipment, which he said had pushed the franchises away from a retail mindset and towards a sales-focused approach; five years earlier, he said, the market still supported a retail mentality. He added that he was seeing existing companies in printing and graphics interested in co-branding with the franchise to widen their market presence and offering. The same article gave Columbia, Maryland as the base of both Image360 and Signs By Tomorrow in 2016, while Signs Now and the parent company sat in Plymouth, Michigan.

Today Alliance describes an Image360 centre as working in environmental graphics, mobile graphics, wayfinding and promotional displays, and says the centres also handle site analysis, permitting and design, taking a client “from imagination through installation.” Entrepreneur’s directory files the brand under business services and sums up its range as signs, graphics, displays, digital imaging and visual communications. Its text speaks of locations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, and its data panel gives a figure of 267 units.

The same directory sets out how a centre is run. It lists about 80 hours of on-the-job training and 86 hours of classroom training for new owners, says a centre needs three to eight staff, and says absentee or part-time ownership is not allowed. In 2016 Palmer told Signs of the Times that Signs Now took three months to train new franchise members.

How sign franchises present themselves.

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.

Part of a Plymouth, Michigan franchise group.

Alliance Franchise Brands has kept growing around the Image360 name. A June 2026 Signs of the Times report, based on a company release, described a network of almost 500 independent locations across North America and listed the parent’s brands, among them Allegra Marketing Print Mail, Image360, Signs Now, Signs By Tomorrow, KKP and Insty-Prints, along with an installation brand, True Install. The same report said Alliance had appointed a new chief development officer to lead franchise development across that network.

In franchise rankings, Entrepreneur placed Image360 at number 236 in its 2026 Franchise 500 and at number 124 in its 2026 Top Global Franchises list. The two location totals, 267 units in the directory and almost 500 for the whole of Alliance in June 2026, measure different things: one brand on its own against a group of sister brands that share a parent.

The brand’s story is one of naming as much as of signs. A sign franchise from 1986 carried on under its own name while its parent built a wider brand above it, aimed at clients who want environmental graphics, wayfinding and displays from one supplier.

For a design guide, Image360 shows how a franchise group can add a broader brand above older sign names without retiring them. Compare Signs Now, a sister brand in the same Alliance sign group, and Allegra, its marketing and print sibling. For this guide we use an ink blue, a signal orange and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Image360’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.