A guide to designing your own personalised plaques

Whether you’re celebrating an occasion, commemorating a person or pet or labelling a tree with its botanical name, personalised plaques are the answer.

They can be large or small, with room for several rows of words or a single line, suitable for indoor or outdoor use, and pretty much any shape you like.

Plaques for outdoor use are best made from bronze or stainless steel: they will survive any amount of weather for decades without becoming tarnished or losing their legibility.

If your plaque is for indoor use you can still use both bronze and steel, but brass gives you another option to play with.   Brass can be used outdoors but only where you can reach it easily, as it tarnishes easily in the outdoor air and needs regular polishing. The classic brass plate of a doctor’s surgery or business premises is normally polished at least once a week, and often daily.

The three main metals we use for making personalised plaques

Indoors, brass is much easier to live with as it doesn’t tarnish so fast. Even so, players of brass musical instruments tend to give them a good rub-down every day. Brass is a very fine metal with a lovely gold-like lustre. It’s easy to mould and engrave, so it can be made into all sorts of different shapes, and engraved with pictures as well as words, to create truly personalised plaques.

Bronze is very similar to brass: both are alloys of copper but bronze has tin added, whereas zinc is added for brass. The tin content makes bronze a little less bright than brass, but has the advantage of making it more tarnish-proof. Bronze can be shaped and engraved as easily as brass; the main difference between them is their appearance.

Stainless steel, on the other hand, is a metal that gives a much more modern look than either brass or bronze. It’s a bit different, edgy and decidedly un-classic, compared to bronze and brass. It can be left bright or the surface can be brushed to give a more muted appearance.

There are dozens of different grades of steel. The one we use, marine-grade Stainless Steel 316, has the highest level of corrosion resistance. It will resist most industrial chemicals and solvents, salty water and air, and sulphur (a major component of acid rain), so it can be used in all outdoor situations. It is particularly good for personalised plaques that will be fixed onto benches or walls near the sea.

If you don’t want metal

There’s a range of alternatives to metal, if you want something lighter or your budget doesn’t run to a metal plate.

You could have your plaque engraved on perspex, wood or even leather (though that obviously wouldn’t make for such a long-lasting memorial).

Personalisation

Creating your ideal plaque is very simple:

• Choose the shape of your plaque;
• decide on the wording and font;
• add a motif if you want one, or a logo, or a picture of the person or pet you’re remembering;
• and we arrange everything to fit.

We don’t charge for doing layouts so if you’re stuck just come and talk to us about what you want. If your message and picture won’t fit, we can just make the plaque bigger!

More options

For bronze plaques you can either have plain metal or we can fill in the wording and any picture with colour for extra zing and clarity – cream or white work very well. Colour can also be applied to stainless steel and brass.

Metal plaques can have screw-holes drilled in them for easy fixing and can also be mounted on backing boards if they’re to be installed indoors.

If you’re stuck for ideas…

If you’re stuck for ideas, why not take a look at some personalised plaques we prepared earlier for other people? You can see them on our Showcase page. When you click on a picture it opens in a new page with more information about the project.

For further information and to discuss your needs, please phone us on 01241 828 694 or email us.

Or if you’re in a hurry, use our Quick Quote form to send us your ideas and we will be in touch to discuss a custom order to match your requirements.