Illuminated business signage runs from lettering above a shopfront to a free-standing totem at the entrance of a yard. We manufacture in Győr and install in the Zagreb area, including Velika Gorica and the surrounding Turopolje settlements. The questions below deal with legibility at road speed, choosing between a totem and facade lettering, what the local climate does to a sealed enclosure, how much light is acceptable next to housing, running costs, and the documentation we hand over.
Illuminated signage in Velika Gorica — manufacturing, installation, quote
Turopolje is flat, low-lying and damp. Autumn mornings here bring fog that sits in the fields around Velika Mlaka and Novo Čiče until mid-morning, and the same moisture works its way into anything that was not sealed properly. At the same time the commercial geography is strung out along roads: businesses on the approaches to town, freight and service companies between Pleso and the airport, and workshops set back from the carriageway behind a forecourt. An illuminated sign in this environment is read from a moving vehicle far more often than from a pavement, and it spends a third of the year in air that is close to saturated. Those two facts, speed and moisture, drive nearly every specification decision we make here.
What must a sign achieve at sixty kilometres an hour?
Letter height, contrast and the two-second rule
A driver at sixty kilometres an hour covers about seventeen metres a second, and a sign glimpsed for two seconds has to be read in those two seconds or not at all. That imposes a hard discipline: the business name, one identifying element, and nothing else. As a rule of thumb a capital letter reads comfortably at roughly thirty times its own height, so a name intended to be caught at ninety metres wants letters of around thirty centimetres, not fifteen. Telephone numbers, opening hours and lists of services belong on the door, where somebody who has already stopped can read them at leisure.
Totem or facade lettering — which suits this kind of site?
Where the building sits back from the road
Where the building stands at the pavement edge, letters on the facade are the natural answer and the cheapest good one. Where the premises sit behind a forecourt or a parking area, as most of the businesses along the approach roads do, the facade is too far back and at too oblique an angle to work, and a totem at the entrance does the job the building cannot. A totem also solves a problem that facades create: it can carry several tenants of a shared yard on one structure, in a consistent format, rather than accumulating six mismatched boards on a gate over a decade.
How does Turopolje damp change the construction?
Sealing, drainage and the condensation nobody plans for
Rain is the easy part. The difficulty in a river-plain climate is that warm, wet air enters a housing during the day and condenses on the inside of the face at night, and a perfectly waterproof box is precisely the one that traps it. Our outdoor enclosures are therefore sealed against ingress but drained at the lowest point, so anything that does condense has a way out, and the cable entries use proper glands rather than sealant. Fixings and frames are specified in materials that tolerate the humidity, and any steel is protected rather than painted and hoped for.
How much light is too much beside housing?
Two levels, and the neighbour test
A sign on a road frontage with flats or houses behind it needs a lower night setting than a sign in an industrial yard, and the practical way to achieve this is a timer or a light sensor switching between a daytime and a night-time output. The test we apply is simple: stand in the nearest residential window at eleven at night and see whether the sign is a light source in the room. If it is, the level comes down. This is worth taking seriously because a sign that irritates the neighbourhood generates complaints, and complaints end with the sign switched off.
What does an illuminated sign cost to run for a year?
The arithmetic, done properly
A modern LED sign of a few square metres draws in the order of tens of watts per square metre, not the hundreds an older fluorescent box needed. Running twelve hours a day, that is a modest annual figure, and the night dimming described above reduces it further. The larger cost over five years is not electricity but attention: a wash twice a year, a check of the power supplies, and the replacement of a supply unit somewhere around the fourth or fifth year. Budgeting for those three items keeps a sign looking new; ignoring them is what makes signs look tired long before the diodes have failed.
What paperwork do you supply for an application?
Drawings and data, not promises
Signage on a street frontage is regulated, and requirements differ by location and by the type of sign. We prepare a dimensioned drawing showing the sign on the elevation, the fixing detail, the luminance and power data, and the material specification, in a form suitable for submission. What we cannot do is tell you what the decision will be, and we will not imply otherwise. Where the answer is likely to be difficult, it is far cheaper to find out before fabrication than after, and we would rather redraw a proposal twice than build the wrong one once.
