Plaques Archives | QuickTrophy Blog

Tips for Engraving Plaques

By Terrence Dehring

Setting up the engraving for plaques can be an intimidating task – especially if you have never done it before. But we make it easier to get great looking results at QuickTrophy. We have built in a tool that lets you select the font, the font size, and the font style for each line of text when you need help engraving plaques. If you don’t know how to start, you can use one of our plaque templates and just change the lines you want. But just by following 3 simple tips for engraving plaques, you can easily get professional looking results.

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Garden Signs

Garden Marker Signs are a new product line we have added at QuickTrophy this past year. Garden signs are used as formal markers in garden plots or arboretums. They are, for instance, used for recognition in community garden plots that are taken care of by volunteers.

We’ve had many requests for garden signs over the years and finally found a solution that works. They offer the customer a wide variety of choices in the size, shape and color of the sign. You can even change the font size and style to fit the “mood” of the garden plot.

For needs of a more permanent nature, we also offer some cast aluminum garden signs and park bench plaques with an engraved anodized plate. We offer these signs with a stake attachment for sticking into the ground, or with screws for attaching them to walls or park benches. Deep cast custom aluminum signs usually cost over $500 each, but these affordable signs are available at a fraction of the cost.

Acknowledge Talent with Awards

The world of work has changed in recent years. Gone are the days when an individual would work at the same job or with the same company for years and years, retiring after decades of faithful service. With a great deal of companies, both large and small going out of business, merging with others or otherwise changing in some form, that type of behavior is not as likely to be seen in these more modern times.

Technology’s Role

Even though the global economy seems to still be struggling, start up companies abound. Plenty of people have innovative ideas that are designed to harness the energy and advances of the technological era. These types of businesses continue to pop up in spite of all the economic changes. Businesses of this type also seem to attract the best and brightest of the talent that is in the workforce today.

Young Workers and the Changing Landscape of Employment

A great deal of this change is driven by the recent graduates who grew up comfortable with technology. They have the background needed to take these start ups from zero to success in a record amount of time. The knowledge and energy of this fresh talent is what propels many of these startups to the front of the line in their respective industries.

Keeping the Talent

There is no doubt that there is a lot to be said about the importance of keeping happy the energetic talent that successfully starts up a business. Many companies find that once they start to become successful, other businesses try to woo their employees away. While non disclosure agreements can help protect a company’s secrets from being shared, they do not protect a company against losing the staff that spawned those great ideas to begin with to a competitor.

Loyalty Within the Company

Motivating such employees to stay loyal to a company these days can involve a variety of different options. Some ways to reward workers include paid days off, house cleaning, car detailing, meals out, catered meals in, and the like. Other methods include a focus on the simpler things in life.

Tooting an Employee’s Horn

There are few people who don’t like to be acknowledged for a job well done. When it comes being praised, most employees enjoy being thanked by their boss or called out on the crucial role they played on getting the big project completed in a satisfactory manner. Having a set schedule for handing out awards and trophies allows employees to engage in both teamwork and a little friendly competition.

Implement an Award Wall

By implementing an award wall along one area of a hallway or other centrally located space, top employees can enjoy having their custom corporate awards displayed there for all to see. Of course, this does not mean that the employee cannot have a copy of the award as well. After all, most employees will want a copy of that certificate for their own personal records. In addition, the individual might want to display it in a particular place within their home.

How to Clean Bronze Award Plaques

Winning an award plaque is an honor for anyone, regardless of what it’s for. However, keeping bronze award plaques shiny and looking like new can be a chore.

Winning an award plaque is an honor for anyone, regardless of what it’s for. However, keeping bronze award plaques shiny and looking like new can be a chore. Melynda Sorrel gives us some tips in her article for eHow on how to clean a bronze plaque and even some reasons that you might have one to start with.

Source: http://www.ehow.com/how_4968042_clean-bronze-plaques.html

Bronze award plaques sit outdoors and commemorate things as mundane as park benches or as grand as a cathedral. But being exposed to the elements does tarnish them. And they are easy to clean with simple products you can find in your home.

Garden Plaques

Over the years customers have requested we produce garden plaques or small signs they can place in their gardens or yards. After doing some research into the types of products we could make that would fit the bill, we decided on some nice, simple engraved signs that are attached to strong, wire that can be placed in the ground. They are weather proof and hold up well in the outdoors – even weather conditions as harsh as those we experience in Marquette.

They come in two shapes: square with rounded corners and ovals. They also come in 2 sizes, small or large. The small garden plaques are mounted on wire stakes 10″ long and the large garden plaques are mounted on wire stakes 15″ long. All wires are galvanized steel so they will not rust.

These garden plaques make great gifts for the casual yard gardener, are great for public spaces such as church yards where you want to recognize volunteer gardeners, or in areas where you want to identify the plants found there.

Behind the Trophies

Schools, camps, and organizations award children whenever they accomplish something worth celebrating. These include anything from getting straight A’s at school, winning in football, emerging a champion in a spelling bee, or graduating as a valedictorian. Rewarding the students can be in the form of a trophy, a plaque, a medal, a certificate, or probably all of these. There is pride behind the trophies and awards: Children feel good when their families, friends, and teachers are proud of them. They become proud of themselves, too, and gain confidence – an attribute that is very important in real life.

Speaking of real life – children may not notice this (at least at first) but these awards are more than concrete proof that they have done good in school, or in sports, or somewhere else. Many kids strive to be their best in the things that they do so that they can receive the recognition. In the long run, this motivation leads to greater things. The children learn more important things like discipline, teamwork, perseverance, self-confidence, hard work, and many other values which are essential even when they grow up into adults.

In some cases, specific lessons are also at the backseat when immersing kids into an activity and giving them motivation to finish the task. A good example of this is the small garden project of a few students – a project which not only gave them a big trophy, but also taught them the skill of gardening and growing crops, as well as the importance of keeping a healthy lifestyle. As the kids learned more about cooking their own food, they have been exposed to the fun that is associated with healthy eating. Read more about this life lesson from Chris Gee’s report.

The Importance of Plaques

Plaques or commemorative plates are given to individuals or organizations to recognize something they have done or achieved. An example of the importance of plaques given to people are plaques of recognition which are most often seen given at a corporate event or movie star awards night. A government agency or organization may put a plaque on a building if the place becomes or is an important part of history.

One example of a plaque that honors a person is the blue plaque. A blue plaque is a plaque given in UK to link a place and an important person together and serves as a historical marker. According to the article “Blue Plaque hour stars” in The Oxford Times, the childhood house of Ronnie Barker, a well known British comedian, along with the house where the deceased Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees and his wife shared in Thames will have a blue plaque to commemorate the two celebrities.

Because plaques are made to remember a person, place or event, the value of plaques cannot be underestimated. A very old Chines plaque was unearthed and was auctioned. Because of the historical importance of the plaque, the bidding ended at $851,000! This just shows the importance of plaques to history.

It is easy to order commemorative plaques at QuickTrophy. Simply select the size, type, and style of plaque you want and follow our easy to use plaque layout screen. You can choose the font, the font size, and font effects such as bold or italics. And you can see what it will look like with an on-line instant proof. If you are still concerned with the look, simply request a proof when you place the order and our engravers will email you a proof for approval prior to producing your plaque.

QuickTrophy Mission

As a team, we have been reviewing and revamping our QuickTrophy mission. And in the process, we have discovered a few things about ourselves that we knew, but apparently never realized. We always identified QuickTrophy as the fastest trophy company on the planet. And most likely we are, but what happens if someday someone makes trophies as fast as we do, or even faster? Would we lose our reason for being? So we decided that the “Fastest Trophy Company in the World” tag line should be replaced by something more personal. Of course, we would still strive to be the fastest, and that feature would serve our customers very well, too. But what else do we do? What do we do that will positively impact not only our customers, the people who buy our trophies and awards, but also impact the people who eventually receive the awards? And how can we positively impact the people here, who make the trophies, awards, plaques and medals? The answer finally came at our last staff meeting: “We build pride into all our products”.

This mission or strategic direction affects how we perceive the work we do. Knowing that the trophies we build will help the person who presents them to the children feel proud of the positive influence they have had on a persons life. The person who receives the trophy or award or plaque will feel proud too, of their accomplishment.

“We Build Pride into all Our Products” is just the beginning of our QuickTrophy mission statement, but it is the part that we all remember and the part that most influences us in our day to day work at QuickTrophy.

Plaque Engraving Layout

Customers will often call us and ask for help in either plaque engraving layout or what text to use when engraving plaques. To help with the plaque engraving layout, QuickTrophy has several samples available on their website. When you get to the page that asks for plaque engraving instructions, there is a link labeled “Want some plaque ideas?”. When you click on this link, it shows several plaques with different engraving designs and layouts. If you select one of the sample plaques, the web site automatically fills in the engraving template to match the example selected. Simply change the text you want to appear on your plaque and the process is complete! For instance, change the name in the example to the name you want, change the dates and events in the same way and the formatting will stay the same. If you want to delete a line, select it and hit the space bar to replace the text with an invisible space. It’s easy to look like a professional!

The World of Trophies

What is the world of trophies? Where to start? There is a whole world to write about when it comes to trophies. Trophy design, trophy manufacturing. New trophies and old trophies. The people to order trophies and the people who receive them. The look on children’s faces when they win the season trophy. The world of trophies throughout history, trophies in the media, and trophy icons we all recognize.

And then there is QuickTrophy and the people who work here, the day to day events, the challenges of building a company, and Marquette, the lovely place we live, huddled along the shore of Lake Superior in Upper Michigan.

I guess the thing to do is just start and see where it goes.