We received a call a short while back from West Inn & Suites Hotel in Carlsbad, California. Located on the corner of a busy intersection, at Avenida Encinas and Canon Road, the monument sign marks the way to West Village. If you are in the area, and are looking for a great place to stay for an evening or a weekend, we recommend that you check them out.
They contacted us because they needed a new custom lighted monument sign to replace the old one in front of the hotel. Instead of building a brand-new monument sign from scratch, we were able to renovate their existing sign and give it a brand-new look.
Take a look at the pictures in this article. You can see the old monument sign and the newly renovated one. To give this sign a fresh new look with a lot more pop and better visibility, we had to do a few things.
First, we updated the faces on the monument sign. The sign features logos from the three different entities located within the property: The West Inn & Suites, West Bistro, and the West Steak & Seafood.
Each logo needed updating and the background color of the faces needed to be changed to a lighter color to make the logos more noticeable during the day. The old sign has more of a muted background that caused the logos to blend in, which makes them much harder to see.
Second, we updated the lighting. The sign was previously powered by fluorescent lights, which had stopped working over time. In addition, the customer had added an LED light strip in the past that surrounded the perimeter of the face of the monument sign. This lighting technique works as a nice accent for some types of signs, but was no longer functional for this sign with the other lights out, because it features three distinct logos that each need to be individually lit.
In the new monument sign, each logo is internally illuminated with its own LED lights, so that each logo clearly stands out. 
The graphics on the faces of the sign are made with a translucent or perforated vinyl, which allows light to pass through from the inside, while still displaying high resolution graphics from the outside.
In all, this project included the removal of the existing sign faces as well as the removal of the existing LED strip lighting. It also included painting the monument face to match the color of the new sign faces, and the fabrication of new faces with updated vinyl graphics.
If you have any questions about updating an old monument sign or installing a new, or if you have any questions about any other kinds of signs, we would be more than happy to help. If you are in the area, feel free to stop by our sign studio and take a look at some of the many sign products that we have to offer.
Written by: North Coast Signs
