We make illuminated signs - fabricated letters, halo-lit lettering, sealed lightboxes and free-standing pylons - and we fit them ourselves. Litija is 384 kilometres from the workshop, so signs are built and tested complete before they travel and installed in a single visit. These sections work through the decisions in the order they matter here: the speed of the reader, the construction, the night-time setting, the damp of a river valley, the permit annex, and the service model at this distance.
Illuminated signage in Litija — manufacturing, installation, quote
Slovenia · 384 km from our plant in Győr
Signage in Litija is a road problem more than a shopping-street problem. Ljubljanska cesta carries the town's through traffic along the river and past the station, the yards and workshops on Ponoviška cesta face onto working roads rather than onto pedestrian frontages, and Valvazorjev trg is the one place where somebody is standing still long enough to read a sentence. A sign designed for a browsing pedestrian and a sign designed for a driver at forty kilometres an hour are different objects, and most of the disappointing signs in any small town are the first kind put up in the second situation.
Start from the speed of the reader, not the size of your logo
Two seconds on the through road, thirty on the square
Work out how long your reader has. A driver on Ljubljanska cesta gets about two seconds, which is one short name and possibly one number - nothing else survives. Someone standing on Valvazorjev trg or waiting on the station forecourt has as long as they want, and there a sign can carry a second line and a small amount of detail without being wasted. Almost every draft we receive from a customer has too many words for the situation it is going into. The most valuable thing we do at the design stage is delete, and the sign that results is usually smaller, cheaper and considerably more effective than the one that was asked for. Bring us the position and the traffic before you bring us the artwork.
Choose the construction by how it will be repaired
Letters, box or panel, judged over ten years
Individually fabricated letters look best on a modern frontage and fail gracefully: each character is its own sealed unit, so one dead letter is swapped without disturbing the rest, and the wall between the characters stays dark at night. A lightbox costs less per square metre and is easy to reface when a name changes, but it is one lit rectangle and it will always read as one. A small programmable panel is the only construction that can change what it says, and it is wasted money if your text never changes. Judge the three over a decade rather than over an invoice. On a workshop frontage where a truck may clip a low sign, letters that can be replaced individually pay for themselves the first time it happens. On a rented unit with a five-year lease, a refaceable box is the rational choice.
Set the night output before the sign goes on the wall
Dimming is a specification, not an afterthought
A sign in a small town is usually near somebody's bedroom window, and the complaint that follows an over-bright installation always ends the same way: the sign comes down or gets dimmed. Build the dimming in from the start. We set a daytime level, an evening level and an overnight state, on a schedule that runs without anyone touching it, and we write the values on the handover sheet so they can be checked or changed later. Retrofitting control to a sealed housing already fixed at height is a genuine expense - the sign comes off the wall, the housing is opened, and at 384 kilometres that means a journey that was entirely avoidable. It costs nothing to specify correctly at the drawing stage and a great deal to correct afterwards.
Protect the housing against the valley damp, not just the rain
Fog on the Sava, condensation, and where water actually gets in
The stretch of the Sava between the road bridge and Šmartno pri Litiji holds mist and damp air for long stretches of the colder months, and the failure we are called to most often in such places is not driven rain but persistent humidity. Moist air enters a poorly sealed housing through a cable gland or an unsealed seam, condenses on cold electronics overnight, and does its damage slowly enough that nobody notices until a driver dies. Every exterior housing we build is sealed to IP65, glands are fitted properly rather than pushed through a hole, and the enclosure is drained so that anything which does get in has a way out. It is also why we ask about semi-covered positions - a sign under a canopy, in a recessed entrance or in an unheated passage is an outdoor sign as far as the specification is concerned, whatever it looks like on a plan.
Prepare the permit annex and expect nothing beyond it from us
Drawings, loads and luminance, then it is your file
Signs on buildings and signs visible from public roads are subject to requirements, and the requirements are the authority's to apply. We do not lodge applications, we have no standing in the procedure, and we will not tell you how it will end. A supplier who guarantees an outcome is guaranteeing something they do not control. What we produce is the technical annex, and we produce it before manufacture: a scaled drawing of the sign on the elevation, the construction and materials, the fixing detail with the loads it puts into the wall, the mass, the connected load in watts and the day and night luminance settings. Your architect or the building owner submits it. Preparing it early means that if something has to change, it changes on a drawing rather than in a finished aluminium tray.
Plan the service around 384 kilometres
Accessible parts, a labelled diagram and a spares box
We design so that the ordinary faults never need us. Power supplies are placed where a local electrician can reach them behind an access panel, the wiring is labelled, a diagram is fixed inside the housing, and a small spares box is handed over at commissioning. That covers the great majority of what actually goes wrong in the life of a lit sign. The guarantee is one or two years and is written into the order confirmation. Inside it, a genuine defect is our problem and our journey. Outside it, we quote the part and show the travel as a separate figure, so you can decide whether to bring us out or to have your own electrician fit a component we send. At this range that choice is worth having, and hiding the travel inside an hourly rate would take it away from you.
