Why your signboard goes grey after two monsoons

Drive any commercial street in Hubballi and you can date the signage by colour. The reds have gone salmon. The deep blues have gone chalky. The whites have gone the particular yellow-grey of a substrate that was never meant to be outdoors this long.

Owners blame the weather. The weather is not doing anything unusual. What has happened is that a specification decision made months before installation has finally shown up.

There are three places it goes wrong, and none of them are visible on the day the board goes up.

The ink. Solvent printing is the cheapest route and it is the right choice for a campaign with a life of a year or less. It is the wrong choice for a permanent fascia, and it gets sold as permanent constantly. UV-cured and latex inks hold their colour dramatically longer outdoors. The quote difference is real; so is the difference in year three.

The white. On a translucent or backlit face, an opaque white underlayer is what makes the colours above it read as colours rather than as a wash. Laying white as a separate pass takes a machine that can do it and time nobody wants to spend. Skip it and the board is fine at handover, thin at dusk, and grey within two seasons.

The edge. Most fading complaints turn out, on inspection, to be water complaints. Moisture enters at the top edge of the panel, travels behind the print, and lifts it from the substrate. The print then degrades from the back, which is why it looks like fading but does not respond to cleaning. A drip edge and a properly sealed top channel cost very little and are the first thing dropped when a quote is being squeezed.

None of this is exotic. It is why we ask what a board is for before quoting it. A six-month promotional banner and a permanent dealer fascia are different products, and pricing them the same way does nobody any favours — least of all the shopkeeper who has to look at the result every morning.

If you have a board that has gone grey, send us a photograph of it. Nine times out of ten we can tell you which of the three it was.