Welcome to HNS Signs – the award-winning
Birmingham based signage company

Proving yet again that we’re a global leader in innovative and creative sign writing, our hand-painted sign writing project in Waterloo has won a gold award at this year’s FESPA Print Excellence Awards despite facing stiff competition from around the globe with shortlisted entries from Spain, Norway and Belgium.  In fact, we’re no strangers to receiving accolades and have won FESPA Gold awards twice previously. What’s more, HNS is the smallest company to have won a FESPA Gold award.

In a very different awards ceremony to previous years, the event was held virtually earlier this month and was hosted by FESPA’s own Graeme Richardson-Locke. The event had been intended to take place in Madrid earlier in the year but due to COVID concerns had been cancelled. What hadn’t changed was the event attracted the same fierce level of competition and also drew a wide panel of industry experts from around the globe with the same exacting standards

The judges awarded us the gold award in the ‘Non-Printed Signage Category’ for our ‘You Were Detailed and We Won the Walls’ project. The panel praised the project stating “A tremendous result achieved through the agility and skills to overcome a host of onsite challenges”. This hand-painted sign writing project in Waterloo involved sign writing on dilapidated walls suffering from damp. A huge variety of sign writing techniques and materials were involved to execute the creative scheme by painting to walling, floors and through the application of mounted graphics.

The project was sited in a unique space under Waterloo Station. The brief was to transform it into a marketing suite for a new retail development. The concept was to combine the old with the new. Old building with new technology. Traditional signwriting with modern digital print. In short, create an experience that reflects the Past, Present and the Future and is seamlessly joined through one timeline. For the seamless continuity to work both had to match up perfectly. Another signage contractor took care of the digital print leaving us to mark out the past timeline across the floors, walls and ceilings through three rooms and corridors.

We met with challenges throughout the project and damp was only one of these. From crumbling brickwork to working at significant heights and to being provided with no scaled artwork by the designers for these large spaces. These were addressed by creating large scale paper traces back at their offices, extensive usage of scaffold towers, applying anti peel treatments and using Tikkurila specialists paints to give an authentic distressed weathered look. ‘This project was our most challenging to date. But we love it and are very proud of it,’ stated Michelle Henry, HNS’s Managing Director.

For more detailed information about the project visit our Waterloo case study.