Nameboards, nameplates and signage

A name board is the first thing anyone sees of a house, and it is usually the last thing anybody budgets for. The result is the board you see on half the gates in Kerala: a printed sticker on a plywood rectangle, silver for two years and then grey and peeling, because print on a board facing a Kerala monsoon has a short life.

Everything here is cut into the material instead of printed onto it. The letters are engraved and filled, or cut right through so the wall shows behind them, which means the name is still there in ten years whatever the weather has done to the surface around it. For a gate or an outside wall we use a properly finished hardwood or multiwood - the WPC and PVC foam board that shrugs off damp and termites - rather than MDF, which will not last one monsoon outdoors.

The same lettering goes on an apartment nameplate, an office door, a shop fascia, a clinic board, a church notice board, a resort entrance sign or a run of numbered room plates. We set the name out as a drawing at the real size first, in English or Malayalam, and you see it before anything is cut. One board is a perfectly good order.