One Team, Concept Through Installation

On most signage projects, the design and the fabrication belong to different companies. An architect or consultant develops the program, a sign manufacturer bids it, and the drawings change hands somewhere in between. That handoff is where intent gets diluted: value engineering that nobody designed for, materials substituted at the shop, details resolved by whoever happens to be holding the file.

Building Image Group was built to remove that handoff. Our founder coined the term "Creative General Contractor" to describe it — a hybrid of architectural graphic design firm and commercial signage company, where the team that sets the design intent stays accountable for it through documentation, fabrication, and installation. A general contractor does not pour every slab or hang every door. It holds the whole and answers for it. We work the same way.

How a Project Moves

Discovery and programming: We start by understanding the building and the budget in the same conversation. That means walking circulation, identifying decision points and sightlines, and developing a message schedule and sign count — but it also means establishing budget as a design parameter up front, because material and fabrication choices follow from it. A program priced honestly at the start does not get cut apart at the end.

Design: Concept development, environmental graphic design, material studies, and photo-realistic renderings in place, so you can see the system in the building before anything is fabricated. We design against architecture and brand standards simultaneously, and we design for how the space will actually be used rather than how it appears in a plan view.

Documentation and approvals: Shop drawings, mounting details, and code review — ADA, local amendments, and life-safety requirements resolved in the drawings rather than discovered on site. We handle landlord approvals, brand-standards sign-off, and municipal permitting, including projects that cross multiple jurisdictions with different interpretations of the same code.

Fabrication: Some of it happens in our own shop. The rest goes to a curated network of specialist fabricators we have worked with for years, matched to the requirements of the project, selected per piece for what each is genuinely best at: hand-chiseled stone, precision anodized aluminum, cast and formed metal, large-format glass. The advantage is range. A detail does not get value-engineered down to what one shop happens to own, because we are not limited to one shop. What does not change is who answers for the result: we specify it, we approve the samples, we inspect it, and it arrives on site as the thing that was drawn.

Installation: Sequenced to the construction schedule, not to ours. On complex projects that means phased installation across occupied floors, coordination with the general contractor and trades, and site conditions that rarely match the drawing. The crew on site works from the same drawings and the same point of contact as the team that designed the program, so nothing arrives as a surprise.

Service: Every program is backed by a two-year warranty, and we stay reachable after the punch list closes. Buildings change — tenants move, departments merge, wayfinding needs to keep up — and the record of what was built stays with us.

At Waterline, this structure carried approximately 5,500 signs across four distinct environments through multi-year phased installation, coordinated alongside Kairoi Residential, Lincoln Property Company, and Starwood Hotels. For Medical City Healthcare, it meant replacing signage across 16 hospitals and multiple clinics at once, managing permitting across separate municipalities while holding to a single set of brand standards. At Moody Center, it meant absorbing a sponsorship signage package that, by its nature, arrived late — design, fabrication, and installation compressed into the window sponsorship deals leave behind.

Clay Little, AIA, RID, NoackLittle Architecture and Interiors“As an architect and designer, I rely on the creativity and expertise of my consultants to see my client’s vision become reality. I want a collaborative partner throughout the process, not just an order taker.” —

A signage program is not a product that gets ordered; it is a sequence of decisions made under real constraints. Keeping those decisions with one team is the difference between a system that survives the schedule and one that quietly becomes something else.

Ready to get started? Start a Project.