This page is for the case where the design already exists and someone else owns it: a corporate manual, a brand colour and a letterform that were drawn for print. It sets out how to read that document as a fabrication brief, which colours an illuminated build can and cannot reproduce, what happens to a thin typeface when it becomes a lit letter, how to keep a network of signs consistent across sites, and what technical material we hand over for approval by the brand owner and by anybody else who has to see it.
Illuminated signage in Jesenice — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenia · 421 km from our plant in Győr
More of the illuminated signage along Cesta maršala Tita and around the retail edges of Jesenice belongs to a brand than to the business trading under it. A franchise, a fuel network, a bank, a chain pharmacy: each arrives with a manual specifying an exact colour, an exact letterform and an exact set of proportions, and with an approval process behind it. The town's position twenty minutes from the Karavanke tunnel makes that more common here than in comparable places, because operators with a cross-border network standardise hard. Fabricating to a brand manual is a different job from designing a sign, and the interesting work is in the small number of places where a printed specification and an illuminated object cannot both be satisfied.
Read the manual as a fabrication brief, not as a picture
Find the three numbers it does not contain
A brand manual usually specifies colour, proportion and clear space, and usually says nothing about depth, luminance or fixing. Those are the three things a fabricator has to decide, and if you do not decide them, somebody will decide them badly. Before anything is drawn we extract from the manual what is genuinely mandatory, mark what is silent, and put the silences in writing to the brand owner. Half of the disputes we see at approval stage are about a matter the manual never addressed, and they are settled far more cheaply on paper than on a scaffold.
Test the brand colour as light before you commit to it
A printed reference and an emitting surface are not the same object
A colour specified for print is defined by the light it reflects; an illuminated sign defines its colour by the light it emits through a face material, and the two rarely land in the same place. Deep saturated reds and strong blues are the usual difficulty: lit from behind they drift towards pink and towards cyan respectively, and the correction is in the face material rather than in the source. The only reliable method is a physical sample, made in the actual construction, viewed lit and unlit, in daylight and after dark. We make those samples as a matter of course for a brand build, and we ask for the brand owner's sign-off on the sample rather than on a rendering.
Check the letterform against the minimum stroke you can build
A hairline serif is a drawing, not a channel letter
A built-up illuminated letter has a wall thickness, a return depth and a light source inside it, and below a certain stroke width none of those fit. Fine serifs, thin script connections and tight counters are where a manual and a fabrication meet their limit. There are honest ways out: build the fine elements as opaque and let the heavier strokes carry the light, use halo illumination so that the letterform stays a silhouette and the light comes off the wall behind it, or increase the overall size so the thin strokes reach a buildable width. Each of those changes the appearance slightly and each needs the brand owner's agreement, which is why the question is raised at quotation and not at manufacture.
Match the output to the site rather than to the network standard
The same sign on a main road and in a side street
A brand's standard luminance is usually written for a retail park with competing illuminated signage on every side. On a Jesenice frontage with a quiet street and residential windows above, that same setting is uncomfortable, and it will make the sign look cheap rather than prominent. We set two measured levels on site, one for the evening and a lower one for the night, and we record them in the handover sheet so they survive a change of manager. Where the manual states a fixed value, this is worth raising with the brand owner early; in our experience they will accept a site-specific level far more readily than a complaint from the flat above.
Build for a network, not for one shop
Same components, same spares, same drawings across every site
If you operate more than one location, the value is in standardisation behind the face rather than in front of it. Use the same power supply family, the same controller and the same fixing system at every address, so that one set of spares covers all of them and any competent electrician can work on any of them. Keep a single drawing pack per sign type with the site-specific dimensions as a variant rather than as a separate document. This is unglamorous and it is what keeps a small chain's signage working ten years later, when the original supplier and the original manager have both moved on.
Assemble the approval pack once and use it everywhere
What we produce, and the consents that are not ours to give
The pack contains dimensioned fabrication drawings, an elevation showing the sign in place on your actual frontage, the weight and fixing loads, the connected electrical load, the material and finish schedule, and photographs of the approved colour sample. That is what a brand owner needs for approval and what a building owner or an authority will ask to see. Rules apply to what may be fixed to a frontage and they vary by property; making the submission and obtaining whatever consent is required is the client's part of the process, and we make no representations about the result.
