Changelog

Cut-to-shape and cut-to-letter backboards now look like the real thing in the customiser. When no backboard colour is selected, Sign Customiser previews the backing as clear acrylic with a crisp cut edge that follows your design — matching how a finished neon sign actually looks — instead of a flat grey panel.

What’s Changed

• Clear acrylic by default - With no backboard colour chosen, cut-to-shape and cut-to-letter backboards now render as clear acrylic rather than a solid grey shape.
• Visible cut edge - A clean cut line traces the outer edge of the design — the whole silhouette for cut-to-shape, and each letter for cut-to-letter — just like light catching the edge of real acrylic.
• A more accurate preview - Customers see a truer representation of their finished neon sign, helping them feel confident in their design before adding it to the cart.

Sign Customiser now makes sign icons easier for customers to find while they are writing their sign text. The old compact icon control has been replaced with a labelled button and a tidy inline icon grid, so adding a graphic feels like part of the text editing flow instead of a hidden extra step.

What’s Changed

• Clearer icon button - The text editor now shows a bordered icon button with a short label, making the icon picker easier to discover
• Merchant-editable wording - Stores can customise the button label from the Icons settings page to match their own language and product style
• Inline icon grid - Icons now open in a compact panel beneath the text box, keeping the customer in context while they add graphics to their sign
• More stable toolbar layout - The icon button sits neatly alongside the text controls and avoids overlapping the text field on narrower layouts

Many neon shops offer just a single jacket option, so the extra jacket step in the customiser asked customers to make a choice they never really needed to make. Sign Customiser now hides the jacket step by default on new neon customisers, giving shoppers a shorter, more focused path to checkout — without changing how your signs are built.

Behind the scenes, your first jacket option is still applied automatically, so every sign keeps the correct tube colour and your orders carry exactly the same details as before. And if you do offer more than one jacket type, a single setting brings the step straight back.

What’s Changed

• Cleaner customiser by default - New neon customisers hide the jacket step, removing it from both the design sidebar and the order summary
• Correct tube colour kept automatically - Your first jacket option is still applied in the background, so signs render correctly and orders are completely unaffected
• One setting to show or hide - A new “Hide the jacket step from customers” option in your jacket settings lets you turn the step on or off whenever you like
• Ideal for single-jacket shops - Perfect if you only offer one jacket type and want to keep the buying experience as simple as possible

We’ve reworked how the Sign Customiser calculates pricing, checks designs and prepares preview images behind the scenes. The result is a noticeably smoother experience while your customers are designing — and a quicker path to checkout once they’re happy with their sign.

What’s Changed

• Smoother rapid editing - When a customer quickly changes text, colours or sizes, pricing and on-screen validation now keep up without stalling, so the customiser feels more responsive.
• Faster Add to Cart readiness - The Add to Cart button becomes available sooner after a design is finished, reducing the wait before your customers can move through to checkout.
• More accurate previews - Review and preview images refresh from the latest version of the design, so what customers see always matches the sign they’re ordering.
• Less wasted work - Changes that don’t affect the look of the sign no longer trigger unnecessary recalculations, keeping the whole experience quick.
• Better on every device - These improvements are especially noticeable on slower connections and mobile devices, which can help improve conversion rates for your store.

No action is needed on your end — these improvements apply automatically to every customiser.

Sign Customiser has rebuilt the Adjust prices page so percentage-based bulk updates feel safer to use. Before you apply a change you can see exactly how the cheapest and most expensive options will move, and if you need to back out of a price change you can undo the last bulk update without restoring values by hand.

What’s Changed

• Live before-and-after preview - Enter a percentage and instantly see how the cheapest and most expensive options in your customiser will change, including the per-£100 impact of the adjustment
• Confirmation modal - Review the full price range and the number of options affected in a confirmation dialog before any changes are saved
• One-click undo - Roll back the most recent bulk update from the same screen, with a clear note of who applied it and when
• Safer rollbacks - Sign Customiser detects when individual prices have been edited since the last bulk update and prevents the undo from quietly overwriting your manual changes
• Accurate projections - Previews use the same rounding rules as the saved price, so the numbers you see in the preview match the numbers your customers will see

Sign Customiser now ships a dedicated Metal Cut-Out Signs product type. Customers pick a panel shape and type or upload their design, and the sign is rendered as a clean negative-space cut-out from a metal panel — ready to send straight to the laser cutter.

What’s Changed

• New Metal Cut-Out Signs product type — Pick “Metal Cut-Out Signs” in the customiser create flow alongside neon, channel letters, lightbox, wood, and address numbers. Onboarding seeds a complete starter customiser with panels, panel colours, mountings, and an outdoor finishing extra so the new product is ready to sell as soon as it’s created
• Six pre-built panel shapes — Rectangle, rounded rectangle, circle, oval, classic plaque, and banner panels are included out of the box, each with sensible text padding so the cut-out design always sits comfortably inside the panel edge
• AI Sign Designer support — Customers can upload a logo or describe the sign they want and the AI Sign Designer generates clean stencil-style artwork shaped to the selected panel, ready to be cut from metal in a single piece
• Panel colour and material library — A starter library of panel finishes — including raw steel — applies across the visualiser so shoppers see their cut-out design on the actual material they’ll receive
• Mounting and finishing options — Wall standoffs and pre-cut hanging holes ship as mounting choices, with an optional outdoor clear coat extra for signs that need extra protection against the weather
• Frame fit pricing built in — Cut-out signs use area-based frame fit pricing, so quotes scale naturally with panel size using the same pricing model already powering backboards and lightbox signs

Sign Customiser now lets merchants adjust the snap-to-grid spacing used when customers drag elements around the visualiser. Smaller signs no longer have to use the previous 20-unit grid, so you can give customers finer control when positioning words and shapes.

What’s Changed

• Adjustable grid step - The Drag, Scale and Rotate settings now include a grid step field when Snap to Grid is enabled
• Finer control for small signs - Merchants can choose a smaller step to make positioning feel less jumpy on compact designs
• Same default behaviour - Existing customisers continue to use the previous 20-unit grid unless a new value is saved
• Clearer visual feedback - The grid overlay shown during drag and transform actions now matches the selected spacing

The AI Sign Designer has taken a significant step forward at converting customer-supplied logos into neon production artwork. When shoppers upload a brand logo and ask for a neon sign, the output now looks like a clean tube layout your shop could quote and build, with the original wordmark, colours, and proportions intact.

What’s Changed

• Brand typography is now preserved exactly - Wordmarks are traced from the original glyphs, so the source font weight, letter spacing, terminals, and curved baselines come through instead of being replaced by a generic neon script
• Source colours map to tube colours - Brand reds, greens, blues, and other colours from the customer’s logo carry through to the neon tubes rather than collapsing to a single white tube
• Backboards and filled badges are stripped out - Solid discs, shields, dark colour fields, and panel backgrounds behind a logo are removed automatically, leaving only the foreground tubes and lettering a sign shop would actually fabricate
• Flat production artwork instead of a glowing preview - Outputs are now unlit, hard-edged, vector-style tube proofs with no halos, bloom, or photographic glow effects, so what you see is what you’d quote
• Taglines and small lettering survive - Thin, light, or widely spaced text is no longer fattened or regularised; small straplines like “The way to grow your business” remain readable and on the right baseline
• Cleaner separation of text and graphics - Letters stay solid filled, while icons, animals, and decorative shapes are rebuilt as sparse tube paths with negative space between them — matching how a real neon sign is built
• More consistent results from the same upload - Neon prompts now run with tighter generation settings, so re-running the same logo produces noticeably less variation between attempts

Sign Customiser now tells customers exactly which characters in their text the chosen font can’t render, instead of a generic “invalid characters” warning. The same check has been extended across every sign type and runs again at add-to-cart, so orders with unrenderable text can no longer slip through to the merchant.

What’s Changed

• Specific character feedback - The “invalid characters” message now lists the exact glyphs the font is missing, so customers know whether to fix a typo, swap a symbol, or pick a different font
• Coverage across all sign types - Font glyph validation previously only ran for material-length pricing; it now runs for every sign that uses customer-typed text
• Add-to-cart safety net - If an unsupported character slips past the live warning, the customiser now blocks add-to-cart and surfaces the same specific message, preventing unrenderable orders from reaching the merchant
• Updated default label - The default invalid-characters label includes a {characters} placeholder so merchants who customise the wording still see the offending characters listed in their own copy

Sign Customiser now supports proper top-down vertical writing for multilingual signs. Merchants can configure whether vertical columns read right to left or left to right, so customers can type natural multi-line text while the preview and manufacturing output keep the intended layout.

What’s Changed

• Multi-column vertical text - Each typed line becomes its own top-down column, making vertical Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and traditional Mongolian layouts practical for customer-facing customisers
• Merchant-controlled column direction - Choose right-to-left columns for Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean signs, or left-to-right columns for traditional Mongolian signs
• Natural order details - Cart details, order data, and exports keep the customer’s original typed text instead of replacing it with a generated column representation
• Pricing stays logical - Base line pricing follows the typed input lines while letter charges still apply to each visible character
• Font guidance in settings - The admin settings now remind merchants to upload fonts with the glyph coverage needed for their target language