Work through the following steps and the design brief for an illuminated sign writes itself. Establish what the building will physically take, choose the construction, set the night behaviour, decide whether a sign is even the right product, prepare the documentation your designer will submit, and plan for a maintenance regime that does not depend on a van from 472 kilometres away.
Illuminated signage in Požega — manufacturing, installation, quote
Croatia · 472 km from our plant in Győr
The signage question in Požega is really a question about one square. Trg Svetog Trojstva is the town's commercial as well as its ceremonial centre, it carries the cathedral of St Teresa of Ávila and the Holy Trinity column, and the buildings around it are historic. A business trading there is designing for a setting where restraint is expected and the neighbours are close, and the same is true of the frontages along the Orljava promenade. A business out on the D51 approach, or at the works gates at Zvečevo and Plamen, has the opposite problem: it is invisible unless the sign is large, simple and lit well enough to be read from a moving vehicle.
Survey the frontage before you commission a design
Historic elevation, plain render, or profiled industrial cladding
On a historic elevation the sign is designed around its fixings: as few penetrations as possible, details that can be reversed, and a construction that will not stain the stonework beneath it. On plain render over blockwork almost anything is straightforward, and the only real question is aesthetic. Where the elevation is profiled sheet, the load has to go back to the frame behind it and never into the cladding, and the cable entry is drawn at the same time as the brackets instead of being improvised on the day. Have all this established, with photographs and a note of the wall build-up, before a designer starts drawing.
Choose between letters and a lit face
What each construction costs you in money and in maintenance
Individually built letters, lit from within and standing proud of the wall, allow the building to show through the name and suit a frontage on the square. Each character is a separate assembly, so a long business name is priced accordingly. A panel with a translucent illuminated face is cheaper, produces one even field of light, and handles a complicated mark or a quantity of small text that letters cannot. Out on an approach road, where the reading happens through a windscreen at speed, the panel tends to win on engineering as well as on price.
Set the night level for the square, not for the road
Three scheduled levels, and knowing when to switch off
Brightness should be scheduled: a daytime level, an evening level, a night level, and if it suits the setting, an hour at which the sign turns off altogether. On a historic square with apartments above the shops, and along the Orljava promenade where people walk in the evening, the night level should be low as a matter of course, and a saturated colour should be lower still, since strongly coloured light reads much brighter to the eye than the same measured output in white. A useful test is to stand at the window opposite at eleven at night and look back at your own sign before anybody else does.
Ask whether the message will ever change
The one question that separates a sign from a display
If the wording will be identical in three years, buy a sign; a display is a costly way to show a fixed word. If prices, hours, seasonal offers or languages move, a display pays for itself in reprints and in the labour of putting them up. Once that line is crossed the module geometry applies, and it is unforgiving: the picture is made of landscape tiles measuring 320 by 160 millimetres, so a shop fascia band of 1.92 by 0.32 metres is six tiles wide and two high, and a size between those steps cannot be built.
Hand the technical annexes to your designer
What we produce, and what has to be submitted locally
Signage is regulated, and in a historic setting the regulation is tighter and more parties are involved. We are not your representative there and we make no claims about the result. Our part is the technical file: measured drawings, how the sign is fixed and what that puts into the wall, its weight, its load in watts, the brightness we declare and the timetable it runs to. Your architect or a local agent lodges it. Starting that step while the sign is still a drawing, rather than once it is manufactured, is what keeps a signage project on its date more reliably than anything else.
Plan for maintenance you can carry out locally
Accessible components, spares in the box, and itemised call-outs
At 472 kilometres, a sign that only we can service is a badly designed sign. So gear trays open from the front or from underneath, the drivers and power supplies are catalogue parts rather than proprietary ones, and a spares pack is delivered with the sign so that an electrician in the town can put it right the same week. Where we do attend, the kilometres, the subsistence and any overnight are separate rows on the offer rather than absorbed into the price of the sign. Cover lasts a year, or two years on the heavier constructions, and applies to what left our workshop.
