We recently made a channel letter sign for CSUN’s baseball field’s new entryway. From the photos, you can see that the sign is internally illuminated so it can be seen at nighttime. Schools require many different types of signs and this is not the first time we’ve made an entrance sign for a school. Whether it’s a monument sign that goes into the ground, a wall sign that goes onto a building, or a letter sign for an arch, an illuminated sign is a great way to let people know how to enter the school or part of a school.
In the daytime, you can see the logo colors of red and black, but at nighttime, the letters are illuminated white. We did this by using day and night vinyl on the faces of the letters. The black portions have day and night vinyl, and the red border is painted aluminum so it doesn’t illuminate. The reason we used day and night vinyl was because the letters needed to be partially black, but black cannot be illuminated. Day and night vinyl comes in different colors, this one is black. The vinyl is perforated so it has small holes all over it. The day and night vinyl was applied onto white acrylic and backlit with white LEDs, so at nighttime, the white is all you can see.
Although the entire face does not illuminate, we still consider these front-lit channel letters because the illumination is coming from the front. Another lighting style for channel letters is reverse-lit, but this wasn’t an option that we could consider for this sign because the LEDs wouldn’t have something to reflect the light off of. We might have been able to add a backer panel behind the sign, but it would have completely changed the look of the sign.