When you’re opening a new restaurant, branding is very important because your logo will go on everything from your signage to your to-go bags. Taco Ranch is a new restaurant that opened in Shadow Hills, California that focuses on fresh Mexican food. They were in need of all new signage for their new business and the first step was deciding on a logo. We are not logo designers so we don’t usually make a logo from scratch, however, if you have an idea of what you want, our in-house designer can definitely create something that will work great for your business.The owner had looked around online at a few fonts and images and sent them over to us to get started. For the exterior, she needed the main sign for her storefront, one for another side of the building, and new signs for the plaza’s pole face. She had ideas for a nice illuminated sign to go in the front facing the parking lot but since her restaurant was going to be at the edge of the plaza, she wanted to put another sign facing the adjacent street. This sign was to look identical to the main sign, but non-illuminated. After looking around at some signs we’d done previously, she decided to go with compound channel letters for her storefront sign.
Compound channel letters are a combination of front-lit and reverse-lit channel letters. While the returns are made from aluminum, the face is translucent and the back is clear. You can use the same color LEDs, however, here is an aluminum layer in the middle of the channel letter so you can have different colored LEDs for the front and back. She went with white to illuminate the faces and red for the halo-effect.
Initially, we were going to install these directly onto the building wall, but during proofing, we found that the landlord wanted us to keep the raceway with the cloud pattern as the background as all of the other tenants had it and he wanted the signs to have some uniformity. The previous background was red so we took it down, made a new one, painted it black to match the new sign better, and installed the new letters onto the black backer. The side sign was also made like a front-lit channel letter, we just didn’t install any LEDs inside.
For the new faces for the pole sign, we kept it simple and did black lettering on a white background. We used the same font that our designer made to match the other signage.