School is back in session in Huntsville, and you don’t need a calendar to know it — you can just look around our shop. Athlete banners on every press, classroom materials going out the door, and one school graphics project we can’t stop talking about: a pair of stairwells at Morris Middle School.
The Stairwells at Morris Middle
Our crew spent a few days at Morris Middle this month turning two stairwells into something students might actually look forward to climbing.
One set carries the school’s Eagle. The artwork Morris Middle brought us looked great at normal size — but artwork that looks fine on a phone screen is not artwork that survives being blown up five feet tall. So we rebuilt it as clean vector first, then tiled it riser by riser so the whole face pulls together as you come down the steps.
The other stairwell we laid out from the ground up: nineteen risers, nineteen messages, all the way to the bottom. Be kind. Be true. Be you. Effort is your superpower. Every step counts. Together we soar.
Stairs are humbling work, and most of it happens before anything gets printed. You measure every riser on its own, because no two are exactly the same and the corners are never as square as the drawing says. There’s no faking it — a seam off by an eighth of an inch is the first thing a seventh grader notices.
Schools spend all day telling students to take pride in where they are. A graphic like this is the building itself saying it. Morris Middle shared the finished stairwells with their community, and the response from students and parents made a few long days on the stairs feel more than worth it. Thank you, Morris Middle, for trusting us with it. Go Eagles.
Beyond Stairwells: Wall Graphics for Schools
Stairwells are the dramatic version, but school graphics come in every shape a building does. Gym walls carrying the mascot at full roar. Hallway graphics with school values or college banners. Cafeteria murals, library walls, entryway lettering that welcomes families on registration day, window graphics for the front office.
The process is the same no matter the surface: our designers build or rebuild the artwork so it holds up at any size, we print it in-house on materials that can survive daily life in a middle school, and our own installers put it up — measured to the actual wall, not the drawing. If your school has a blank wall that’s been a blank wall for thirty years, that’s raw material.
Meanwhile, Back at the Shop: Banner Season
We put banners at 20% off for August because we knew what August means around here — football, volleyball, senior banners, PTA fundraising, sponsorship signs for the fence line. Huntsville’s schools and booster clubs took us up on it in a big way.
We ran out of banner material. Then we ran out of hemming tape. Then people from every other department — including the person writing this post — got pulled in to trim, hem, grommet and roll banners, because that’s what all-hands-on-deck means at a family shop.
Now that we’ve restocked, and since school sports season is just getting started, the 20% off banner sale is extended through September. Coaches and booster clubs, that’s your cue.
And for the Teachers
Our Classroom Scrap Program turns leftover material from big jobs — canvas trim, magnets, rigid boards, rolled banner and vinyl — into free supplies for local classrooms. There’s nothing we can use it for here for, but we trust the kids know exactly what to do with it.
This month Rob and Sarah from the Production Floor delivered several boxes of art-making goodies and armfuls of rolled material to Hazel Green Elementary, and the welcome they got made everybody’s week. Two more school deliveries are already lined up for September, and the teacher waitlist keeps growing. So long as we Teachers: there’s a signup on that page, and we’d love to add your classroom.
Why This Matters to Us
We’ve been part of this community since 1970. The people who work here went to these schools; their kids go to these schools. When a teacher stretches a classroom budget with our scraps, or a staircase makes a kid look up on the way to third period — that’s the whole point of being a local shop instead of an upload button.
If you’re a teacher, coach, PTA member, or administrator with a project in mind — a banner run, a gym wall, a stairwell of your own — call us at 256-539-2973 or request a quote. Big or small, whatever the budget: we can do that.
