Printed tiles, stickers or a ready-made pack: which suits your city?
Every city build reaches the same moment. The bricks are done, the road is down, and the street still looks empty. What finishes it is detail on flat tiles: a stop sign, a street name, a 30 limit outside the school. There are three ways to get that detail onto a LEGO® build, and each one suits a different builder.
Option 1: printed tiles
A printed tile has the design printed straight onto the piece. Official printed tiles come in sets, and custom printers will print your own design onto a new tile. The print is part of the tile, so it never lifts or peels, which makes printed tiles the toughest choice for anything that gets handled a lot.
The catch is cost and choice. Custom printing usually runs to a few pounds a tile, and official prints only cover the designs LEGO decided to make. A whole town’s worth of signs adds up quickly.
Option 2: a sticker sheet
A sticker sheet gives you dozens of designs for the price of a few printed tiles. Our Road & Traffic Signs sheet has 84 for £9.50. You cut them out yourself and apply them to your own tiles, in whatever size and colour your build needs.
It is the best value when you need lots: a full junction, a bus route, a whole high street. It does ask for a sharp blade, a steady hand and an evening, and there is always that held-breath moment as you line a sticker up over a brand new tile. Plenty of builders enjoy that part. Some would rather be building.
Option 3: tiles with the stickers already on
This is our newest option, and our customers pointed us to it. So many of our recent orders have been road signs, and one buyer took three sheets at once. Lots of builders want the signs. Not all of them want the cutting, or the nerves of getting every one dead straight.
So we built a pack you design yourself. On the Build Your Own Sign Pack page you pick the exact signs you need, choose a tile colour (white, light grey, dark grey or black), and we apply them to genuine LEGO tiles for you. Six tiles cost £6, twelve cost £10 and eighteen cost £14. You can mix in street art too: foxes, pigeons and spray cans for the wall behind the bus stop.
To be clear, these are vinyl stickers on real tiles, not prints. We cut each one to sit just inside the tile edge and apply it flat, so on a display build it looks the part. If your build lives in a toy box, printed is tougher.
Printed, cut it yourself, or ready-made. Somebody was working late.
So which should you choose?
A handful of signs for the MOC on your desk right now: a ready-made pack. A whole city, or you enjoy the making: the sheet. One special design, or a build that gets played with hard: printed.
Many builders mix them. A pack for the junction everyone looks at first, the sheet for everything else. If you want ideas for where signs do the most work, our post on signs that sell the scene walks down a finished street.
Build your pack
Pick your signs, choose a colour and add the pack to your basket. Your list travels with the order, so we build exactly what you chose. Start your sign pack here.
