As a venue operator or facilities manager, you know what it means when your building has to match a once-in-a-generation moment. When your job is to dress up an iconic building to channel the championship-level energy happening inside its walls, you need a flawless execution that does the moment justice.
That's exactly the challenge Van Andel Arena faced this year. The Grand Rapids Griffins wrapped up the most dominant regular season in franchise history. Finishing with an incredible 51-16-4-1 record, clinching the Central Division title, and securing second place overall in the American Hockey League (AHL), the team gave the city plenty to celebrate, and the arena needed to look the part, fast.
But how exactly do you manage, print, and install a graphic meant to welcome thousands of fans to the heart of Grand Rapids?
More Than Just a "Big Sticker"
When people hear "giant graphic on a building," they picture a scaled-up version of a laptop decal. The reality is closer to a professional vehicle wrap, except the canvas is a six-story landmark of structural steel, tinted glass, and masonry sitting in the middle of downtown.
That canvas doesn't forgive standard vinyl. A project like this calls for heavy-duty, cast vinyl films engineered to grip an exterior wall and hold their color and shape through UV exposure and Michigan weather. Whatever your building is announcing, the material holding that message up matters as much as the message itself.
The Work Nobody Sees
Your building isn't where a project like this starts. It starts weeks earlier, long before anyone touches a surface. A graphic this size can't be printed as one piece. It has to be sliced into panels, measured, numbered, and mapped to an exact spot on your building, so that when a crew is forty feet in the air, there's no guessing left to do. Every seam, window line, and expansion joint on your building has to be accounted for on paper first.
This is the part of the process the public will never see happen, and it's also the part that decides whether your finished graphic looks seamless or sloppy. If a vendor rushes past it, that's usually where a project starts to go wrong.
Why Vendor Coordination Is the Hidden Risk
Projects like this involve a service team, designer, a printer, and an installer, and that's usually where things go wrong. If those four haven't worked together before, mismatches show up at the worst possible moment, forty feet off the ground.
FASTSIGNS Grand Rapids has been installing alongside The Sign Guys for years. That history means our print layout and their installation pacing already move in sync. When it's your project on the wall, that synergy is what stands between a smooth install and a costly one.
What Can Go Wrong (And How to Plan Around It)
Height alone isn't what should worry you on a project like this. Wind is. A sheet of heavy-duty vinyl can act like a sail, and a sudden gust can ruin a panel before it's secured, or worse, put your installation crew at risk.
That's why the days before your install matter as much as the install itself. You're watching for a window of time where wind stays low enough that the vinyl won't catch air, the temperature climbs above 50°F so the adhesive can actually bond to your building, and conditions stay safe for a crew working at height. Get that window right, and a full installation comes together in a single day. Get it wrong, and you're looking at ruined material, a delayed timeline, or a safety incident you can't take back.
Your Building, Your Moment
When the final panel is locked into place and the lift lowers to the ground, the transformation is undeniable. For Van Andel Arena, the building now tells the story of the Griffins' record-breaking season before a single fan steps inside the gates. It amplifies the energy of the entire city center, turning a regular sidewalk into part of the game-day experience.
You don't need a building the size of an arena to have a moment worth marking. A new location, a big anniversary, a milestone worth telling the whole city about: whatever it is, your space should say so before anyone walks through the door. We've already solved the hard version of this problem. Let's talk about what we can do for yours.
