Designing Your Own Tram Scroll: A Step-by-Step Guide

Designing your own tram scroll is the most popular path through our site, and for good reason — the result is a piece that is genuinely yours, listing the destinations that matter to you instead of someone else’s idea of an iconic route. The process is straightforward, but it does reward a bit of planning before you sit down at the Design Your Own tool. This guide walks through every stage in plain English: choosing destinations, picking a font and colour, sizing the piece for your wall, the free proof, revisions and dispatch. By the end you will have a clear sense of what to prepare before you start, what to expect along the way, and roughly when the scroll will arrive.

Step 1: Choosing Your Destinations and Routes

The destination list is the heart of the piece. Most customers choose between three broad approaches. The first is to follow a real heritage route — say, the historic Sydney 88 to Bondi, or the Melbourne route 96 from East Brunswick to St Kilda. Our city heritage posts on the lost trams of Sydney and Melbourne’s iconic tram network are good background reading for this approach. The second is to build a family route: the suburb your parents grew up in, the suburb you went to school in, the place you met your partner, the suburb you live in now. The third is a milestone-themed list: places that map to anniversaries, holidays or career chapters. We typically recommend somewhere between eight and fourteen destinations on a standard scroll — more than that becomes hard to read, fewer leaves the canvas looking thin. Write your list down before you open the design tool; it is much easier to refine on paper. One detail worth flagging: the order of destinations on a scroll matters. The original blinds were operational, so the destinations ran in the order the tram actually reached them. If you are designing a heritage-true piece, mirror that operational order; if you are designing a family-history piece, chronological order (oldest at the top, current address at the bottom) tells the story most cleanly.

Step 2: Font and Colour Selection

The destination blinds inside heritage Australian trams used a handful of recognisable typographic styles — broadly speaking, condensed sans-serifs and a couple of distinctive uppercase variants modelled on workshop hand-painted lettering. Our design tool offers a small, curated set that all read as authentic to the period; we deliberately do not offer hundreds of fonts because most of them would look wrong. The colour question is similar: the operational palette was cream paper, oxblood or amber lettering, and the occasional black emphasis. Stick close to that palette and the result reads as a heritage piece rather than a costume. If you would like to push slightly more contemporary, the tool allows a deeper red or a muted blue accent, both of which sit naturally against off-white walls. For a richer styling discussion, our industrial décor guide walks through how the typography interacts with timber, metal and warm lighting in a real room. A practical note on legibility: line lengths longer than about twenty characters start to read awkwardly on a tall narrow format. Where possible, keep destination names compact — abbreviating “South Yarra” to “Sth Yarra” or dropping a road suffix can make the difference between a clean line and a cramped one. The design tool flags any line that looks tight, but writing it out compact from the start saves a revision round.

Step 3: Sizing the Piece for Your Wall

The tall, narrow format means standard canvas-print sizing rules do not apply. The most popular size for an entryway, hallway or feature panel is our medium scroll at around 100 cm tall — large enough to read from across the room, small enough to fit between most architectural features. For living rooms, studies and stairwells with a tall vertical wall, the larger sizes hold their own as the main artwork and rarely need a companion piece. Before you commit, do the cheap-and-easy trick: cut a rectangle of newspaper or kraft paper to the dimensions you are considering and blu-tack it to the wall. Live with it for a couple of days; if it still feels right on the third day, you have the right size. Our pricing page has the full size-by-size breakdown, and the FAQs answer the common sizing questions (multi-piece walls, ceiling height, frame allowances). If you have a tall wall — say, a double-height entryway or a stairwell with a four-metre ceiling — do not be afraid of the largest size; a scroll that is too small in a tall space simply looks lost, and the larger format is the one that justifies the architecture rather than fighting it.

Step 4: The Free Proof and Revisions

Once you have submitted your destination list, font and size, we send a free, full-size digital proof — there is no proof fee, the proof is included in the standard price. The proof is the moment to be ruthless: check every spelling (Australian English place-names trip people up — Wollongong, Ulladulla, Toowoomba, Bundaberg all have particular spellings), check capitalisation, check the order of destinations matches the route direction you wanted, check any dates or family names at the foot of the piece. If anything is off, send back the changes and we will issue a revised proof. Most pieces go through one or two proof rounds; we would rather catch a typo on screen than on canvas. Once you sign off, the scroll moves to print. The advice in our tram scrolls as gifts piece applies double here if the piece is a surprise: get the destination list right via a quiet conversation with the family before you start. The proof is a flat PDF showing the layout at full size — print it on A4 if you want to see the typography at close to true scale, or zoom it on screen to 100 percent. Either approach is enough to catch the small details before we move to canvas.

Step 5: Printing, Finishing and Dispatch

Once you have approved the proof, your scroll goes into production at one of our two workshops — Noosa or Booragoon, depending on workload and dispatch destination. The canvas is printed on heavyweight cotton with pigment inks, then trimmed, mounted to the solid Australian timber rails, and finished with brass top and bottom fittings. The total turnaround from proof approval to dispatch is typically 7-10 working days; current lead times and any seasonal updates are on our shipping page. Pieces ship in a heavy-duty cardboard tube or flat-packed depending on size, with full hanging instructions. If you want to read about the heritage cities most commonly featured on personalised scrolls, our pieces on Adelaide’s tram revival and Brisbane’s forgotten tram era are both useful starting points. For broader Australian design inspiration before you commit, Domino and Home Beautiful AU both run good archive galleries. Tracking is included on every dispatch, so you will know the day the piece is on the truck and roughly when it will arrive. Most metropolitan deliveries land within three working days of dispatch; regional and remote destinations sometimes take a little longer, which the shipping page covers in detail.

Ready to Start Designing?

Jot down your destinations on paper, decide on the rough size that suits your wall, and head across to the Design Your Own tool when you are ready. The proof is free and the revisions are unlimited within reason — we would rather get it right than rush it. If you would prefer a pre-built city scroll instead, the main shop has the most popular routes ready to ship. Any questions, the FAQs are a good first stop or drop us a note via the contact form.