Channel letters are one of the most popular signs we make for buildings. Whether you have a restaurant, apartment complex, office building, or retail store, a channel letter is perfect for advertising your business. Channel letters are named so because they are hollow, therefore there is a channel inside where LEDs can be installed. Some clients do want non-illuminated channel letters for the depth but adding internal illumination will do a lot for your advertising.
Bartz-Altadonna was interested in getting a front-lit channel letter sign for their building. Being front-lit means that the faces are translucent and most of the time incorporate colors that can be seen at night time when the sign is on. There were some components of the sign we couldn’t make illuminated which were the smaller words around the logo and “californiahealth”. The stoke of a letter needs to be a certain thickness in order for us to be able to produce them, and sometimes a tagline or additional details are too small to internally illuminate. If they’re not too far off, we will sometimes thicken up the stroke a bit or make the sign a little larger, but that was not an option with this sign design. Instead, we made those letters as dimensional letters, which are non-illuminated 3-dimensional letters.
Due to the texture of the building, we couldn’t install the dimensional letters directly onto the facade so they were installed onto a clear backer panel first, which was installed on the wall. This worked out well because the channel letters needed to be installed on a raceway also. Unless we have access behind where the sign is going, a raceway is required to hold the electrical components of the sign. The channel letters are installed onto the raceway at our shop, and the entire thing is transported and installed at the sign location.