CSUN is renovating their baseball field. Among many additions, they’re adding an entryway that honors Matador Baseball history. CSUN’s mascot is Matty the Matador. We made a sign for the top of the entryway that reads “CSUN MATADORS”. From the photos, you can see that the sign looks drastically different during the daytime and nighttime.
Front-lit channel letters are usually made with acrylic faces that are attached to the return with trimcap. Whatever color we use on the face is backlit at nighttime. The trim cap comes in different colors and can be painted, but the border it creates is not very noticeable. The CSUN Matador logo features stylized letters with a thick border. In order to recreate this look in the daytime as well as nighttime, we custom fabricated aluminum-faced letters with cut out faces backed with acrylic.
In the daytime, you can see the thick red border from the front, and the rest of the letter is black. The returns are also painted red. At nighttime, the aluminum part doesn’t light up, but the black part of the letter does. The black portion of the letter is day and night vinyl, which is a perforated vinyl. Although the vinyl is black, it’s applied on white translucent acrylic with white LEDs inside of the channel letters so at nighttime when the LEDs are on, the lights shine through the dots of the perforation so that portion illuminates white.
Normally, we stud mount channel letters through the back of the letter onto the building. However, this sign was to be installed directly on top of the entryway so we stud mounted the letters through the bottom of the letters and used horizontal support straps as needed. Ar raceway was installed on the entryway for the electricity to hook up to.