Look down to discover one of today’s most effective branding tools: custom floor graphics. You may know them from basketball courts, but they can be used in several other applications and industries. Printed decals and stickers are where the rubber meets the road — or in this case, where the vinyl meets the floor — to spur interaction and drive unique engagement between businesses and customers across industries.
SpeedPro prints these custom visual pieces for a variety of indoor and outdoor applications. Vinyl floor graphics are an excellent addition for companies looking to brand and stand apart from the rest, commanding attention from the ground up.
Ready to command attention with custom floor graphics? Contact SpeedPro for a consultation.
Curious about floor graphics? Discover what they are, their benefits, how to use them, and where to install them.
Table of Contents
What Are Custom Vinyl Floor Graphics?
Business Benefits of Indoor and Outdoor Floor Graphics
Design Options for Floor Graphics
Placement Options for Custom Vinyl Floor Graphics
What Are Custom Vinyl Floor Graphics?
Printed floor graphics are a bold and creative utilization of your organization’s floor space. They’re sticker-like decals that you “peel and place” in strategic locations to display select branded themes — inside or outside — as short-term or semi-permanent signage. Most vinyl graphics consist of three parts:
- The base vinyl layer: The base vinyl layer is the flexible substrate that images are printed onto.
- The anti-skid laminate coating: Sometimes referred to as a matte mask, the anti-skid laminate coating protects the design from dangers, such as slips, scratches, discoloration and skid marks.
- The strong adhesive layer: The adhesive layer bonds the decal to the floor during installation.
Custom floor graphics offer a professional stamp onto your space — bringing branding to the ground level. Businesses with floor graphics have gone the extra step to customize and enhance their spaces by embracing environmental graphics. These graphics can easily remain on-brand and on-mission. Many companies use floor graphics’ text and images to display logos, showcase a mission statement, reinforce organization values or highlight other marketing and PR identities.
In short, printing custom floor graphics means printing a piece of your business for that spatial “wow” factor — and reaping strategic marketing benefits along the way.
Business Benefits of Indoor and Outdoor Floor Graphics
Custom vinyl floor graphics break the branding mold. With consumers more ad-saturated than ever, floor graphics are a way to capture and capitalize on the interest of an audience. Even passive eyes, like passing foot traffic or people on their smartphones, can’t miss unique floor decals. While capturing attention is one of the major benefits of outdoor and indoor floor graphics, they can provide your business with several more advantages.
Uncover the five major advantages that indoor and outdoor floor graphics bring to your business:
1. Brand Your Space
Floors are often overlooked in branding, yet they offer a prime, open space for impactful marketing messages that connect with people rather than just sell to them. This approach taps into the experiential design movement, which merges psychology, technology, and visual arts to create engaging, immersive environments.
When done well, experiential design brings your brand to life across all spaces—walls, hallways, floors, and even restrooms. Anyone entering your organization will feel an immediate connection to your brand, reinforcing a strong, memorable experience that drives successful branding.
Floor decals align perfectly with experiential branding. Rather than inundating clients and visitors with familiar advertisements and marketing messages, vinyl floor graphics build a fresh ambiance. They amplify a room’s professional look and feel while also showing off your branded personality.
Custom vinyl floor decals are great for:
- Lobbies and entryways
- Conference rooms
- Trade show booths
- Dining halls and cafeterias
- Reception areas
- Entertainment venues
- Campuses
- Gyms and fitness centers
- Retail stores
- Theaters
2. Direct Traffic
Steer traffic and conduct organic crowd control by printing custom signage directly onto your floors. Since floor graphics can serve as a form of wayfinding signage, you can use them throughout your store, facility, gymnasium or other business location to provide customers and employees with directions.
Here’s how floor decals improve traffic flow in real-world commercial settings, enhancing both organization and customer experience:
- Clear Traffic Control: Floor decals help keep pathways open and reduce bottlenecks, especially in high-traffic areas like checkout lanes and popular departments.
- Efficient Aisle Marking: In supermarkets, floor graphics can act as aisle labels, complementing or even replacing overhead signs, making navigation easier and more intuitive.
- Storefront Visibility: Outdoor floor graphics help distinguish your storefront in malls and outlet centers, drawing attention and increasing foot traffic.
- Welcoming Entryways: Clearly marked entryways prevent confusion, helping customers find the correct door easily. A welcoming, well-marked entry point makes visitors feel comfortable and informed from the moment they approach.
- Enhanced Safety and Compliance: In warehouses and industrial settings, floor graphics are valuable tools for safety. They designate lanes for equipment like pallet jacks and loaders, aiding in safe navigation. Additionally, decals can mark areas for protective gear storage and sanitation stations, supporting a clean and organized workspace.
3. Promote In-Store Products and Sales
Custom floor graphics can be used as temporary or permanent signage, which makes them ideal sales vehicles, promoting goods and services for a select period or proclaiming continual deals.
In-store specials remain as popular as ever. Customers across demographics repeatedly cite how important thrift is in their shopping decisions. Price discounts and free samples are the most common in-store promotions influencing purchases, and custom floor graphics provide an ideal template to guide customers to sampling areas and promote items on sale.
Boosting your in-store specials is an art form as well as an imperative. With 76% of people’s purchasing decisions made in-store, businesses must leverage marketing materials that will connect, convert and close sales in real-time to remain competitive. This process requires effective messaging material design — exactly what you get with custom vinyl floor decals.
Businesses use floor graphics to promote many of the following in-store sales:
- Point-of-sale advertisements at the register or at self-checkout
- Seasonal products and specials
- Flash sales
- Bundles and package deals
- Cross promotions
- New and limited-time merchandise
- Rewards programs
- Membership programs
4. Add an Artistic Touch
Floors are a blank business canvas. Give your business an “it” factor using a medium that’s already right there, in place and available for adornment.
Custom floor decals amplify the aesthetics of your space. They can be used as decorative elements, ornaments, colorful visuals or room accents. SpeedPro has even printed large-format floor decals that look and act like custom flooring itself, adding a creative, bold and eye-catching twist to the normal wooded or tiled commercial space.
These aesthetic touches can be your company’s statement piece. Organizations using indoor floor graphics appear both professional and fun. They aren’t satisfied with conventional appearances or long-held expectations of what a store, restaurant, office, hotel or anything in between should like. Plus, floor decals sit at a price that makes them far more cost-effective than floor renovations — another benefit for businesses looking to revamp their space.
Vinyl floor graphics can complement and enhance branded aesthetics using any of the following:
- Logos
- Slogans and taglines
- Mascots or branded company figures
- Geometric patterns and shapes
- Material textures, such as marbling, masonry or brick
- Product pictures
5. Surprise, Inform and Delight Viewers
Floor decals and graphics make the floor speak for you. They support and reinforce your brand, convey relevant information, embellish your space and captivate attention. They can also relay other details about your organization — details that otherwise wouldn’t meet the eye.
Consider the bits and pieces that make your organization genuinely unique, such as its founding date, sales figures, first sale and publications it’s been featured in. These details build an unfolding and memorable story at your customers’ feet. Surprise and delight customers by including any of the following in your unique custom floor graphics:
- Industry awards or distinctions you’ve won
- Facts about your organization
- Your mission statement or company values
- Quirky company or industry facts
Floor signage and graphics can communicate all this information seamlessly and organically. As a result, everyone from passive visitors to returning customers will connect more with your brand, feeling a part of its enduring success.
Contact a Local Studio for Your Floor Decals Consultation
Vinyl floor graphics provide a creative marketing tool with serious conversion power. For example, a study from Point of Purchase Advertising International’s Mass Merchant Study identified point-of-sale displays as increasing sales by 1.4 times. The most common variable to that sales-boosting success? Rotating displays to keep pictures and information fresh — precisely what floor point-of-sale promotions do.
Given their unique capacity for attention-nabbing and novelty, custom floor decals, stickers and graphics are a standout choice for point of sale and promotional advertisements. They can be big and bold or smart and subtle. Best of all, custom vinyl graphics grab the attention of the hardest to reach customers. The floor really is the limit to capture leads and earn business from the following traditionally challenging consumer categories:
- People on their smartphones: The average American will use their smartphones 52 times in a single day. That translates to 3.3 hours staring down at a handheld screen — down being the operative word. Positioning logos, marketing messages and company information directly in that line of sight is an unbeatable marketing strategy.
- People in lines: Bright, bold and visually arresting, floor graphics are an MVP in the lineup of influential point-of-sale conversion tactics detailed above. And when are eyes primed for bright and bold stimulus? When they’re waiting in line. Whether in-house at your own register or in public queues — such as those at bus stops and subway stations — indoor and outdoor floor graphics make for interesting visual material for those waiting in line.
- People in a hurry: Most sales signs and advertisements hang at or above eye level. This placement makes sense for intentional shoppers and in-store browsers, but what about those not in an active shopping mindset? Research indicates that those walking in a rush focus more on their footing, an unconscious reaction our brain initiates to ensure stability given increased walking speeds. You can take advantage of this natural occurrence through strategically set floor graphics designed to capture the attention of people not currently focused on shopping.
Design Options for Floor Graphics
While we touched on it previously, you might be wondering what designs you can include on floor stickers and graphics. Due to floor decals’ versatility, you can add various designs and graphics to them, such as patterns, slogans, directional graphics, printed textures and mascots. These custom designs can improve a floor sticker’s appearance and better brand your business or organization. If you want to make your floor graphics as attractive as possible, check out some of the top ideas for floor graphics:
- Patterns and Shapes: Floor decals are eye-catching on their own, but adding unique shapes and patterns, like geometric designs, can give them a stylish, modern look. Custom shapes help floor graphics stand out beyond standard squares and circles.
- Taglines, Logos, and Slogans: Reinforce your brand by adding taglines, logos, or slogans. Floor graphics with branded text and images share your values and make your company memorable.
- Printed Textures: For a classic touch, printed textures like wood grain, marble, or brick can elevate your space’s ambiance. Textures can also enhance product displays, such as a football field pattern near sports gear.
- Product Images: Use product images on floor graphics to spark interest and guide customers to items in-store. Placing product decals outside your store or booth can attract attention and encourage visits.
- Branding Figures and Mascots: Many businesses place mascots or brand figures on floor decals to draw attention and enhance brand recognition. This approach is popular at sports venues and children’s stores, where mascots create a friendly, memorable experience.
- Directions: Guide visitors with directional floor graphics, from simple arrows pointing to the front desk to detailed designs for special areas. Adding clear instructions helps customers find their way around your business with ease.
Schedule Your Floor Graphics Design Consultation with SpeedPro Today
Placement Options for Custom Vinyl Floor Graphics
There are a few “ground rules” for placing and sustaining vinyl floor graphics. For example, it’s essential to always prepare the floor before installation, which means cleaning the entire application site to remove dust, dirt and oils. After cleaning a surface, you’ll need to dry it thoroughly to ensure the decal’s adhesive backing can adequately stick. Depending on your floor type, there may be additional steps and preparations to take into account.
Find out more about the main rules for placing custom vinyl floor decals indoors and outdoors below:
1. Outdoor Placement Tips
Outdoor decals must be tough and durable. They require patient application for text and images to remain intact and protected from the increased elements their outdoor setting exposes them to. Concrete and asphalt are the two primary surfaces for exterior floor decals. Before application, take care to avoid large cracks, bumps and uneven terrain present in any concrete or asphalt base. Attempting to place decals over cracks will prevent the adhesive from binding to the surface properly and result in peeling graphics.
Check out some of the other primary tips for outdoor installation below:
- Choose Slip-Resistant Laminates: It is essential to use slip-resistant laminates, especially in high-traffic areas like doorways, sidewalks, and parking lots, to ensure safety.
- Opt for Matte Protection and Strong Adhesive: Adding a matte laminate layer protects your floor graphics from UV rays, ice, and rain, while a strong adhesive keeps them securely in place.
- Address Moisture and Condensation: Be sure to fill and smooth any cracks or holes where condensation may collect. Allow at least 24 hours for the filler to dry completely before applying the graphics.
- Consider Temperature Fluctuations: Avoid covering temperature relief channels in cement or asphalt, as these help prevent surface cracks due to changes in temperature.
2. Indoor Placement Tips
Keeping the installation area clean and dry beforehand is as essential indoors as it is outdoors. With indoor applications, you’ll also want to note any treatments the application site receives, such as waxing and vacuuming. Hold off on surface treatments for 24 to 48 hours before laying your indoor images. Usually, vinyl, wood, indoor concrete and tile work best as bases for vinyl floor graphics. The smoother these surfaces are, the better.
Before you apply floor graphics indoors, learn more about some primary indoor installation tips:
- Avoid grout lines and tile edges: When you install floor graphics on vinyl or tile, place them no less than half an inch from tile edges and grout lines. Like cracks in cement or asphalt, these spaces can trap air bubbles and cause premature peeling.
- Stay away from floor end joints: When applying a decal to wood or wood laminate, keep an eye out for floor end joints. Even shallow ones can make custom floor decals pucker and appear bumpy and irregular.
- Use a squeegee when applying decals:By using a squeegee during decal application, your decals will be less likely to have air pockets than they would if you pressed your decals manually onto a surface with your hands. Squeegees prevent air pockets by giving you more even pressure during application.
- Give the newly applied decal eight to 24 hours to sit: Depending on your floor graphic’s size and scale, you’ll want to let it sit for eight to 24 hours before you let people walk on it or interact with it in any way. Afterward, you can treat your floor graphic like any other part of the flooring.
SpeedPro: Your Partner in Printing Custom Floor Graphics
Your business, brand and vision matter — make your messages count just as much. SpeedPro’s national network of imaging studios is adept at handling indoor and outdoor custom vinyl graphics. When you select us as your printing partner, you’ll gain access to insights and expertise across the entire floor graphics order process. We’ll also give your business a personal representative devoted to fielding questions and handling any decal-related concerns.
We can guide you through your selection of custom floor substrates, laminates and adhesives, as well as application preparation and installation. Find your local SpeedPro studio to get started — we’re just a click away.
