As a property manager, you have a lot of responsibilities to make sure that your tenants are happy. One of the many factors of tenant improvement is signage. If you’re renting space in an outdoor plaza, your business can be hard to see from the street depending on your location. For storefront signage, many landlords will make sure that every tenant has a fair amount of space for their signs. But in order to give all tenants visibility from the street, many outdoor shopping centers will have a monument sign.A monument sign is a large outdoor sign that is normally installed close to the street so it can be seen from vehicle traffic. Taller monument signs are sometimes called pylon signs or pole signs. Tenant monument signs can have one panel for the one business in the building, or multiple panels that can be switched out as tenants come and go.
A multi-tenant monument sign is what they had at Glen Plaza, an outdoor shopping center in San Fernando. The large plaza has many tenants and the monument sign accommodates 18 tenants. The sign is also double-sided and internally illuminated so it can be seen from both sides of traffic in the daytime and at nighttime. The property manager contacted us because the sign was not lighting up anymore and one of the metal retainers on the side were gone. Since the sign needed to be looked at anyway, she wanted to take the opportunity to make the whole sign look nicer by repainting the sign and replacing the different tenant’s sign faces.
First we went out to the location for a site survey to see what would need to be done to get the sign to light, and to get the measurements for the new retainer and sign faces. We ended up doing an LED conversion on the sign (they had previously had fluorescent tube lighting), we cleaned the inside of the cans, painted the outside a glossy black, and made new faces for almost all of the tenants.
The customer initially wanted a modern, uniform font for all of the tenants, but after seeing how it would look she decided to go in a different direction. We did make all of the panels white with black lettering, but we used a different font for each tenant and changed the font size and kerning based off of how many letters there were.