Chronic Tacos is growing quickly and new restaurants and locations bring the need for new signage. A plaza in Fresno, California was expanding and a new Chronic Tacos location was going to occupy one of the new suites. Even before the completion of the building, Chronic Tacos contacted us to start on the new exterior signs.Exterior signs can take an unexpected amount of time to be installed depending on where you are due to the fact that a sign permit needs to be pulled from the city before installation. Some business owners who don’t know this will hold off on getting their signs until right before they open which puts them in a time crunch. Chronic Tacos also knows that we’re a custom shop so on top of permitting, we need time to proof the signs to make sure they are 100% satisfied with how they are going to look, and we also need a few weeks to make them.
We made two compound channel letter signs for the building, one to face the plaza parking lot where the entrance is, and another to face the street to advertise to people driving by. We always make the same types of compound channel letters signs for Chronic Tacos. Depending on the facade, they vary in size, and sometimes we need to install them using a raceway like we did for one of their Las Vegas locations.
As we’ve gone over in previous blogs, a compound channel letter sign is the combination of front-lit channel letters and reverse-lit channel letters. While the face illuminates white, there is a halo made by red LEDs that are installed facing the wall. There are many options for compound channel letters because you can use the same colored LEDs for both the front and the back, different colored LEDs, or use white LEDs for the face but use colored acrylic or apply a digital print onto the face to give it a different color.
Another exterior sign that we made for them was a blade sign. Blade signs are commonly seen in plazas or malls and they are installed adjacent to the wall so the name of the business can be seen while someone is walking along the building. Having both a storefront sign and a blade sign is a great way to make sure that someone can find your business from all angles.
For uniformity, we used a blade bracket that matched the other ones in the plaza and laid a digital print of the logo onto an aluminum panel. There is also an additional aluminum tube frame for extra durability.
Check out our website gallery for other compound channel letter signs we’ve made. Like we mentioned before, you can have the same color LEDs or different color LEDs.