Seventh-Day Adventist Church is a worldwide organization and one of their many locations is right near us in Sylmar, California. We worked on a couple of outdoor signs for them but the one we’ll be focusing on today are the building letters and address numbers that they wanted to update. Exterior signage lasts for a very long time due to the durable material they’re made from, however, sometimes you want to replace the signs or parts of the signs for aesthetic reasons.With channel letters, the faces are made in a way that they can be removed easily for LED repair and so the faces can be replaced. We’ve done this for many businesses like HealthNet, Supercuts, Vista Ford, and other companies that needed to update their existing signage.
Signs with a separate face like cabinet signs or channel letters are easy to update, however, some signs need to be completely redone. Their existing dimensional letters for their organization name and address numbers were made from plywood that was spaced off of the wall. To give the exterior of the church a more modern look, they wanted metallic letters. When it comes to metallic dimensional letters, we can either make aluminum dimensional letters or acrylic dimensional letters with an aluminum laminate. One option is all aluminum and the other just has an aluminum face on top of acrylic dimensional letters.
The acrylic dimensional letter with the aluminum laminate is what we made for Seventh-Day Adventist Church. You can choose any acrylic color as a base but most customers usually go with clear or black. Black is a good option because it gives a shadow effect behind the aluminum. To add even more dimension and shadow, we mounted the letters off of the wall with 1/2″ spacers, which means that the letters are spaced off of the wall by 1/2″.
We think that the new dimensional letter sign looks great and stands out well against the color of the building. The sign faces the street so it is sure to attract attention. As you can see from the first photo, there are external light sources so the sign can still be seen at night time.
In order to internally illuminate individual letters, we need to make channel letters which require electrical wiring and need to be fabricated to be at least 3 1/2″ deep. If a channel letter sign is out of your budget, or you don’t have electricity access where you want the sign to be, you can always externally illuminate it.