Whether you're printing a street banner or dropping one onto a website, the first question is always the same: what size? How big does a banner need to be for a roadside railing or a march? Which fabric lasts, and which is just the cheap option? Once you know a handful of standard dimensions and how the common banner materials differ, the choice turns out to be surprisingly simple.
Common banner printing sizes
- Roadside
- Street-railing banner — 2.5 x 1 m is the common size.
- Marching / rallies
- For up to 5 people carrying the banner, stay within 2.5 x 1 m.
- For up to 10 people, go up to 3.5 x 1 m.
Measure it with an AR app
To picture how a size will actually look on site, download an AR measuring app from the App Store. Seeing the dimensions mapped onto the real space gives you a far more concrete sense of the finished result — the right tool makes the whole job easier.
The app shown here is CAM TO PLAN.
Common banner materials
Vinyl (canvas) banner
Vinyl — the canvas-style banner cloth — is the cheapest banner fabric, and it's what most of the street banners you see are made of. It's meant for short-term use and holds up for about a year under normal conditions. Its wind resistance is weak, so a typhoon can tear it apart: vinyl simply isn't built for extreme weather.
Vinyl types
Gloss vinyl banner: prints come out more vivid, and the surface reflects in sunlight, which makes the banner stand out.
Matte vinyl banner: colours print more muted, but the matte surface doesn't reflect in sunlight, so the image never disappears into the glare.
Matte black-back vinyl banner: a black coating on the back blocks backlight, stopping the image from being washed out when light shines through from behind.
( Shown: gloss vinyl banner )
Flag cloth banner
Flag cloth is the lightest banner fabric — none of the thick, stiff feel of vinyl. For a march it's the ideal choice: light, and you can roll it up and tuck it into a suitcase without it taking much space. It's usually printed single-sided.
Flag cloth can be printed single- or double-sided, depending on what you need. A double-sided flag weighs more than twice as much as a single-sided one, because the fabric is semi-transparent — print both sides directly and the two images show through each other. So a double-sided flag is really two flag cloths bonded together with a blackout layer in between to keep the front and back images from overlapping.
Coated banner
Coated banner (knife-coated fabric) is a synthetic material — thicker than vinyl and considerably tougher. Its surface is smoother than vinyl and absorbs ink well, so the finished print looks crisp and detailed.
It's the material for long-term use: durable, high-strength and highly flexible. Paired with UV printing, a coated banner can last more than two years, because UV printing boosts the colours' longevity.
Comparing the three banner fabrics
Pick the fabric to match the job. For short-term use, gloss or matte vinyl is cheap and waterproof; for anything long-term, go with a UV-printed coated banner.
Durability: flag cloth < gloss/matte vinyl < coated banner
Weight: flag cloth < gloss/matte vinyl < coated banner
Print quality: gloss/matte vinyl < coated banner < flag cloth < UV coated banner
Price: gloss/matte vinyl < coated banner < flag cloth < UV coated banner
How do I find a website banner's size?
Website banners aren't measured in centimetres — they're measured in pixels. A pixel is the basic unit of a digital image; the photos you take on a phone or digital camera are counted in pixels too.
Finding a website banner's size is easy: download the image and check its pixel dimensions. Just right-click → Save image, then open the file's details to read off its size.
When a site blocks downloads
If a site won't let you save its images, use ImgDownloader to pull every image on the page. Open the zip, find the one you need, and check its dimensions.
Site: https://imgdownloader.com/
Designing a banner online
Print banner or website banner, there's always a design step. If your company has a designer, it's sorted. If you're doing it yourself, don't worry — plenty of sites let you design online for free. The standout is CANVA: a huge library of free assets and dead simple to use, so you won't be stuck with a banner you're not happy with.
CANVA's biggest draw is that you can export high-resolution, print-ready images or PDFs for free, from the download button at the top right of the site.
Banner printing really isn't hard
Once you've settled on the size and material you need, the design side falls into place. There are plenty of online collaboration tools now, and used well they'll save you a lot of time. That said, if you have exacting standards, I'd still suggest bringing in a designer to handle it.
Ready to print? Order vinyl, flag cloth or coated banners from Printing Banana, with delivery across Hong Kong and Macau. Not sure which fabric fits your job? WhatsApp us at +852 3001 5678 — English is fine.