This page covers illuminated signs, shopfront lettering and facade identification in Koprivnica: which construction produces which effect after dark, how bright a sign should be when a residential window is opposite, what can and cannot be fixed to an older frontage, and where the responsibility for consents sits. Fabrication is at our Győr works, 250 kilometres away, which is a single-day journey for the survey and again for the installation.
Illuminated signage in Koprivnica — manufacturing, installation, quote
For illuminated signage Koprivnica splits cleanly into two towns with different rules. One is the historic core around Zrinski trg and Florijanski trg, where frontages are low, uniform and often protected, where the reader is on foot at three metres and where an oversized box would look like vandalism. The other runs along the approach roads and through the Danica zone, where a sign is read at forty or fifty kilometres an hour from a moving vehicle, where the competition is other signs rather than the architecture, and where the gate itself has to be identified before the driver has passed it. The same company sometimes needs both, and the two designs should not be the same artwork at two sizes.
Three constructions and three different night pictures
Face-lit, halo-lit and illuminated tray
Face-lit letters glow across their front surface and read as bright text on a dark wall. They are the loudest option and the right one where the sign has to be picked out from a distance, on a gate in the Danica zone for example. Halo-lit letters are opaque on the face and throw light backwards onto the wall behind, so the letter is read as a silhouette in a halo. That construction is quieter, considerably more expensive per letter, and it is what usually suits a restored frontage on the main square. An illuminated tray, a single lit box with the graphic on its face, is cheapest per square metre and hardest to make look good. It works on modern buildings and it looks out of place on a nineteenth-century one. The choice is aesthetic, but it is also budgetary, and the difference between the three is large enough to affect what else you can afford.
Brightness after closing, with flats above
A dimming schedule agreed at design stage
A sign that is comfortable at two in the afternoon can be a nuisance at eleven at night, and in a town where the upper floors of the central streets are lived in, that becomes somebody's complaint rather than an abstraction. We build a time schedule into the driver: full output during trading hours, a reduced level in the evening, and either a further reduction or a switch-off overnight. This is worth deciding in the design meeting rather than after the first month. Retro-fitting dimming to a sign that was wired to a simple switch means returning to the installation, and from 250 kilometres away a second visit is not a trivial line on an invoice. Written into the specification, it costs almost nothing.
Fixings into a frontage that predates you
Reversible, drained, and recorded on a drawing
On an older facade the fixings matter more than the sign. We work into mortar joints rather than the face of the stone or brick wherever the construction allows it, use stainless fasteners, and sleeve every penetration so that water running down the wall is not led inside it. Cable entries are drilled to fall outwards and sealed at both ends. We also record what was done. A short drawing of the fixing positions, the depths and the cable route goes to you with the handover documents, which matters when the building changes hands or when somebody has to remove the sign in fifteen years. A frontage that can be returned to its previous state without a repair is the standard we work to.
Consents, and the division of responsibility
Rules exist; the technical annexes come from us
Signage on a facade in the central area is regulated, and the requirements differ depending on the building, the street and whether the property is listed. We do not make promises about outcomes and we cannot obtain a consent on your behalf. What we do is supply the technical material the application needs: dimensioned drawings, a visualisation against a photograph of the actual frontage, construction details, the fixing method, the electrical data and the luminance figures. Our experience is that applications fail on incomplete documentation far more often than on the design itself. The sensible sequence is to establish what is permitted before the artwork is finalised, because redesigning a sign that has already been approved internally is more painful than starting from the constraint.
Power, control and the state of things at midnight
Timers, photocells and a switch a human can reach
An illuminated sign of ordinary shop size draws less than most people expect, typically comparable to a couple of domestic appliances, and the driver is the component that determines its life rather than the diodes. We specify drivers with headroom rather than at their limit, because a driver run hot is the part that fails first and the part whose failure looks like a dead sign. Control is by timer, by photocell, or by both, and there is always a manual isolator that a person on the premises can reach without a ladder. That last point sounds trivial until a sign flickers on a Saturday evening and the only way to turn it off is to call an electrician.
Cleaning, component life and a call-out at 250 kilometres
What you can do yourself, and what needs us
A sign in an urban position accumulates dust and traffic film, and its apparent brightness falls long before anything is faulty. A wash twice a year, with plain water and no solvent, restores most of what appears to have been lost. Diodes in a sign of this type are rated in tens of thousands of hours, so the realistic maintenance items are the driver, the seals and the fixings. Warranty runs for one or two years by construction. Because a service visit is a 250 kilometre journey, we supply the driver specification and the fixing detail with the handover pack so that a competent local electrician can carry out a replacement without us. Where a fault is genuinely ours, we come; where it is a blown driver at eight in the evening, you should not have to wait for a van from another country.
