Designing Your Awning: How We Go from Idea to Finished Product

January 1, 2019

If you’ve been thinking about adding awnings to your home or business, you’re not alone. Dorchester Awning Co. has been creating custom awnings for over 100 years, which means we’ve worked with lots of folks and designed and installed a lot of awnings! It also means we’re experts at the process, from start to finish. But what is that process? How do we get from an idea to a custom awning that meets or exceeds the expectations of a home or business owner? Let’s take a look at how we do that, here.

We Look at the Whole Picture

When you come to us for your custom awnings, we’ll begin by listening to you. In fact, that might be the most important part of the whole design process! We want to get as much information and input from you as possible, so that we can create and install a custom awning that perfectly reflects the “personality” of your home or business. We’ll talk to you about colors and styles and, of course, budget. We’ll also show you examples of different color combinations and materials, and will help you make the best possible decisions, given your wants and needs.

After we’ve narrowed down some choices, we’ll go visit your home or business to get a sense of its location, its layout, and the surrounding geography. We’ll review your home or commercial building in order to creatively understand how the awning styles you favor will work in that setting. This attention to detail is important because a custom awning is so much more than fabric and steel. If designed and installed with care, it can become a recognizable symbol of your home or business, and should embody that image wholly and completely.

“See” Your New Awning Before It’s Made!

Before physically building and installing your custom awning, we typically create a computer model of what it will look like on your home or building, and from there we’ll make whatever adjustments are necessary. This rendering is especially important for commercial applications, as you’ll be able to see how your business’s graphics integrate themselves into the style and colors you’ve chosen. Whether residential or commercial, computer imaging is an important and indispensable part of creating the perfect awning, and oftentimes we’ll go through multiple design iterations to make sure of that!

Approval and Installation

Once your design has been perfected and you’ve approved it, our experienced staff will begin to create your custom awning in our workshop. Here’s where all the hard work and thought that you’ve put into your design come to life! After your awning has been completed, it will be installed by our knowledgeable team of experts, and here is where we’ll make any last-minute adjustments as necessary — but we don’t stop there. Because we want to make sure our product continues to delight and impress, we offer free maintenance, cleaning, and adjustments if needed.

If you’d like to learn more about the many options we offer our custom awnings customers and how we work with them to create the perfect product, contact us today!