Six file decisions that determine how a mall hoarding goes up. None of them cost anything at the RIP. All of them cost hours on the wall if they go the other way.
Don’t run a panel through a step in ceiling height. Bridging it means peeling backer on the wall and managing material that never needed to be printed. Slice the art at the step and start a new panel.
Floors slope. Ceilings step. Nothing in a mall is level, and the wall is rarely square to either. The bleed is what absorbs it.
Art continues through the overlap — don’t leave it blank or duplicated. The installer decides which edge laps, based on the primary sightline down the corridor.
Don’t wrap a large panel around it. Corners aren’t square and aren’t plumb, and a panel loses level the moment it turns. Two panels meeting at the corner beat one panel fighting it.
Not a maximum — a target. Wider panels don’t fail at the press. They fail at eight feet up, where one set of arms can’t hold tension across the width. Installers aren’t all the same height.
On most hoarding jobs we find out what the material is by touching it. Film, laminate, adhesive tack — put it on the proof. It changes the tools, the sequence, and the crew size.
Top and bottom only. Sides trim to the overlap.
Every vertical seam. Art carries through.
Target, not a ceiling. Handling limit, not a print limit.
Illustrative elevation — not to scale. Fifteen panels across three faces. Panel 9 begins at the ceiling step; panels 3 and 14 begin at the corners. Hatched bands are bleed. Tinted bands are the 1″ overlap.
Artwork on its own doesn’t tell us how the wall gets built. A proof we can work from carries the layout as well as the image.
Modular plastic hoarding — the click-together rental systems now common in malls and healthcare fit-outs — is a different substrate from painted MDF or drywall. The surface is smoother and less receptive, the panels flex, and the joints between them move. Standard promotional film with a general-purpose adhesive lifts at the edges and telegraphs the joints.
The usual reasoning is that a hoarding graphic is temporary, so it gets a cheap film and skips lamination. On a rental system that logic inverts. The graphic is temporary — the panels aren’t. They go back to the supplier, and they go back clean. That puts the film between two requirements at once: enough tack to hold on plastic, clean enough removal to protect a rented panel. That’s a decision made before output, with the panel supplier and the film manufacturer, not on install night.
Two layout rules follow from it: don’t let a graphic panel bridge a system panel joint where you can avoid it, and confirm the panel module width before you slice the art.
Send us the elevation. We’ll return it marked up with panel breaks, corner matches and ceiling steps — usually within a business day, no charge.
Send us an elevation