Signs · 2026-08-11

Channel Letters vs. Panel Signs vs. Dimensional Letters

There are only three real answers to "what should go on the front of my building," and most business owners pick between them based on a photo they liked rather than what the sign has to do. Which is backwards, because the sign has a job: get read, from a moving car, at the distance where someone can still make the turn.

Let's start with that, then price the options.

The math nobody does first

The old sign-shop rule of thumb: one inch of letter height per ten feet of viewing distance for comfortable reading. So a 12-inch letter reads at about 120 feet. That's the minimum legible version. For traffic moving at 35 or 40 miles an hour, you want considerably more — a lot of sign people work closer to one inch per 25 or 30 feet of distance when the reader is driving past and has maybe three seconds.

Measure from your building face to the point in the road where a driver would need to decide to turn in. Divide. That's your letter height. Now shop.

Do this before you fall in love with a style, because letter height drives cost more than almost anything else, and a beautiful 6-inch sign on a building set back 200 feet from the road is money set on fire.

Channel letters

Fabricated aluminum letters with acrylic faces and LEDs inside, mounted individually to the building or to a raceway that hides the wiring. This is the sign you recognize a business by at night.

Cost, market-wide: roughly $2,000 to $8,000 and up installed. The spread is enormous because the price is set by letter count, letter height, illumination type, mounting method, and how far the electrician has to run power. A short one-word logo at 12 inches is a different animal than a fourteen-character name at 24 inches.

What drives it up:

• Front-lit (light comes through the face) is the standard and the cheapest illuminated option. It also reads best from distance at night.
• Halo-lit / reverse channel (light washes the wall behind the letters) looks more expensive because it is. It's the prettier sign and the less legible one. Beautiful on a professional office, a bad choice on a highway frontage.
• Raceway vs. direct mount. Direct-mounting each letter looks cleaner and costs more, and some landlords require a raceway anyway.
• Permits and engineered drawings. Channel letters almost always need both. Our published lead time is 4 to 8 weeks including permitting — the fabrication isn't the slow part.

Lifespan: the cabinet metal outlives everybody. LEDs typically run 10 years or so before output drops enough to notice, and they're serviceable. Acrylic faces can yellow with UV exposure, which at our altitude happens faster than the brochure suggests.

When it fits: you have street frontage, you're staying in the building, you're open past dark, and the sign is the primary way people find you.

Panel and cabinet signs

Two different things that get lumped together.

A cabinet sign is a lit box with a translucent face — the classic strip-mall sign. One face, one price, easy to swap when the tenant changes. It's the cheapest way to get an illuminated sign on a building, and it reads as exactly what it is. Landlords love them because the box stays and only the face changes.

A flat panel sign isn't illuminated at all. It's a printed rigid panel mounted to the wall. Our panel signs price by the square foot starting at $14 on dibond — a 4-foot by 8-foot panel is 32 square feet, so you're in the mid-hundreds before mounting hardware, not the thousands. Nothing else on a building costs that little.

Lifespan: we rate dibond at 7 to 10 years outdoors, and that's with a UV laminate, which is not optional here. PVC is for indoor and covered outdoor only. Coroplast is a season or two — it's a construction-site material, not a storefront material, no matter what the online printer's photo shows.

When it fits: tight budget, a building that gets daytime traffic, a second-story or interior-corridor tenant, a temporary location, or a business that wants signage up now while the permitted channel letters work their way through review. That last one is a genuinely smart play and almost nobody suggests it.

Dimensional letters

Cut letters in brushed aluminum, acrylic, or PVC, stud-mounted off the wall with a template so the baseline is actually straight. No electricity, no faces to yellow, no LEDs to replace.

Cost: wide range, priced per letter by height, depth, material, and mounting method. Flush-mounted acrylic on an interior lobby wall is inexpensive. Half-inch brushed aluminum at 18 inches, stud-mounted with spacers on an exterior facade, is not. Material and depth are the levers.

Lifespan: the longest of the three. Metal letters properly mounted will outlast your lease. Painted finishes fade at altitude; brushed and anodized metal essentially don't.

The honest downside: at night, your sign is gone. Unless the building has good exterior lighting aimed at it, dimensional letters stop working when the sun does. If half your customers arrive after 6 p.m. in December, this is the wrong choice.

When it fits: professional offices, medical, law, salons, interior lobbies and conference rooms, upscale retail with good ambient lighting, and any facade where the architecture is doing the talking.

The comparison, compressed

• Cheapest permanent exterior sign: printed dibond panel. Hundreds, not thousands.
• Cheapest illuminated: cabinet sign.
• Best night legibility per dollar: front-lit channel letters.
• Best-looking, worst at distance: halo-lit.
• Longest life, no power bill: dimensional metal letters.
• Fastest to install: panel or dimensional. Channel letters and monument signs carry permit time — often 4 to 8 weeks and 6 to 12 weeks respectively.

An opinion you didn't ask for

Most small businesses buy a sign that's too small and too clever. They'll spend $6,000 on halo-lit letters spelling a name in a script face and then wonder why nobody found them. If the sign has one job, spend the money on height and contrast, not on illumination style. A plain front-lit sign at 24 inches beats an elegant halo-lit one at 12 inches every single evening.

Figure out which one you need

Tell us the building, the setback, and what the sign has to do on our free assessment — we'll do the letter-height math and come back with the two options that actually fit, including the one that costs less. The full catalog, with prices where we can publish them, is on our signs page.

Channel letter figures reflect general US market ranges for installed illuminated letter sets. Our panel pricing is what's live on the site today; fabricated and permitted signs are quoted from the actual building.