PANAMA CITY BEACH
“These new [signs] have better quality, they’re more durable, and they’re more sustainable for our community.”
— Sydney Clifton, Communications Manager, Visit Panama City Beach
automotive paint • CNC routing • signage fabrication
complex installation • dimensional letters • digital printing
the client
Panama City Beach has dozens of public access points along its shoreline, each marked by a numbered archway. Visit Panama City Beach (Visit PCB), the destination's tourism development arm, keeps those access points safe and welcoming for the millions who visit each year.
The existing numbered archways had started to show decades of wear, and beach access numbers were hard to read from a distance due to overlapping copy and a busy linear design. Support-beam signage was overloaded with text, making it hard to quickly spot important rip current warnings and rules like dog access.
the project
Visit PCB wanted new signage for 2026. OPA designed a dimensional concept pulling from bright beach colorways, Visit PCB's brand palette, coastal pergolas, and the beach ball that drops each New Year's Eve.
Fifty years of building fabricated signage for public spaces, campuses, and municipalities made OPA Signs & Graphics the natural fit for a project at this scale, and ready to meet its challenges head-on.
our challenge
Durability. Gulf South coastal conditions are brutal on signage. Salt air corrodes hardware, relentless UV bleaches color and weakens materials, humidity invites rot, and hurricane season brings wind loads and storm surge that most inland signage was never built to survive. OPA cut each sign's background from a single piece of HDU, a lightweight exterior architectural foam, to minimize seams and failure points. The dimensional lettering and ball were cut from cast acrylic, standing up to the heat cycling that causes cheaper materials to crack and warp along the coast. Every piece was finished in powder coat or automotive-grade paint and clearcoat to hold color and integrity season after season.
Visibility. A sign that can't be read fast isn't doing its job, especially when it's carrying safety information. Bright colors, high contrast, and wide letter strokes make access signage legible from inland and out at sea. Digitally printed rules signage copy was streamlined so rip current warnings and access rules register at a glance instead of getting buried in a paragraph.
Fit. No two access points on the beach are the same. Entry widths, mounting methods, and ground substrates shift from one to the next. Before fabrication began, OPA field-surveyed and mapped the entire shoreline to make sure every sign was a precise fit while keeping the look consistent across the whole beach.
solution
OPA Signs & Graphics designed, fabricated, and installed the first two sign sets extending out from Pier Park. The response was immediate, drawing attention on social media and local news. Visit PCB has since expanded the order to bring new Panama City Beach signage to all 99 access points along the coast.