An illuminated sign is a small building element, not a graphic. It has fixings, a weight, a power feed, a maintenance route and a service life, and in Petrinja it usually has to be attached to render that was applied very recently. This page covers the sign types we manufacture, how they are fixed to a repaired elevation, what they draw, and how the distance from our workshop is handled on a signage job.
Illuminated signage in Petrinja — manufacturing, installation, quote
Croatia · 362 km from our plant in Győr
Petrinja is a Military Frontier town with a spacious rectangular square at its heart, and after five years of reconstruction a great many of the elevations around that square are newly rendered and freshly painted. That is a particular situation for anyone selling illuminated signage. The surfaces are in better condition than they have been in decades, which is exactly why owners are careful about them: nobody wants the first thing to spoil new plaster to be a badly detailed sign tray. Meanwhile the trading premises on Trg dr. Franje Tuđmana, along Ivana Gundulića and out towards the Gavrilović works are reopening one by one, and each of them needs to be identifiable after dark in a town where the street lighting is modest.
The three sign types, and which premises each suits
Halo-lit letters, face-lit letters, and the illuminated tray
Individually cut letters with the light thrown backwards onto the wall give the quietest result and suit a restored elevation better than anything else: the letters read as silhouettes at night and the wall itself does the glowing. Face-lit letters with an acrylic front are brighter and more legible from the far side of a square, which is what a pharmacy or a bank branch generally wants. The one-piece illuminated tray is the cheapest per square metre and the easiest to change, and it belongs on a retail unit or a workshop rather than on a nineteenth-century facade. We build all three, and we will tell you when the cheapest of them would look wrong on your particular building.
Fixing into a recently repaired elevation
Where the anchors land, and how the sign comes off again
New render over repaired masonry is not a structural material and will not hold a cantilevered load on its own. Our detail carries the sign on stand-off spacers that pass through the insulation and the render into the structure behind, with the penetrations sealed so that nothing tracks water back into the build-up. On a building that has come out of a reconstruction programme we ask for the repair drawings first, so the fixings go where the engineer expects load rather than where the sign happens to be centred. We also design so the sign can be removed and refitted without breaking the render, because a tenant changes long before an elevation does.
Night-time brightness in a town with quiet streets
Bright enough to find, dim enough to live above
A sign in a city centre competes with a great deal of other light. On Petrinja's streets it does not, and a tray built to city brightness will be visibly harsh and will annoy whoever lives on the first floor. We set the output for the actual context and fit a timer or a photocell so the sign steps down late in the evening and off at an agreed hour. That also has a commercial side: a sign that runs at half power for six hours of every night uses noticeably less energy and its LEDs and drivers reach their rated life instead of dying early from heat.
The shopfront band, and coordinating a whole elevation
One rule for several tenants in one building
Where a restored building holds three or four separate businesses, the elevation looks composed only if the signs share a horizontal band, a depth off the wall and a rough letter height. We are happy to set that discipline out as a short drawing for the building owner, so that the second and third tenants have something to work to instead of each improvising. It costs almost nothing at the design stage and it is the difference between a coherent frontage and the accumulation of mismatched boxes that everybody complains about ten years later.
Consumption, drivers and the maintenance route
What a sign costs to run, and how it is reached for service
Modern LED signage draws far less than the fluorescent trays it replaces, and for a typical shopfront the annual electricity is a minor line. The components that fail first are the drivers, not the LEDs, so we place them where they can be reached without scaffolding wherever the building allows it, usually behind an access panel inside the premises. Sealed outdoor housings are specified for the climate that is actually here, with freeze-thaw cycles and driving rain in mind rather than a laboratory figure, and the letters and trays are built to be opened for service instead of being sealed shut.
Survey, manufacture and the journey from Győr
362 kilometres, and how a signage job is scheduled around it
We survey before we quote, because a photograph does not show what is behind the render or where the nearest usable power is. The site visit to Petrinja is 362 kilometres each way, so we combine it with other work in the county where we can, and we will say so rather than charging a full journey for an hour on a ladder. Manufacture happens at the workshop and the finished letters or tray travel assembled. Installation on a modest shopfront is normally a single visit; where an access platform is required, that is arranged locally and appears on the quotation as its own line, as does the mileage.
