Anyone enjoy jigsaw puzzles? That is exactly what this sign required. We have cared for the needs of JLL Property Management for about 6 years now and when they said that they were moving their offices and needed a new lobby sign it was kind of exciting. The company had changed their branding standards about 6 months prior and they wanted to take advantage of the move to update their internal signage.
The design was pretty straight forward. 1/2″ thick acrylic for the logo painted a custom red and brushed, gold tone aluminum for the company name. Because we are painting the acrylic logo, we use a translucent acrylic. We use translucent because there is very little chance that the acrylic color will influence the final color of the product. After a quick coat of primer, we painted the acrylic. The specs for the red color were provided to us from our customer so matching the correct red was simple. When it came time to source the gold tone aluminum, that was another story.
It seems that no one has needed gold tone brushed finish aluminum since 1974 so none of our normal sources could find any. So we did what everybody does when you can’t find something, search on the internet. We ended up finding a specialty metal shop in Texas that had the material we needed and the quantity we needed, almost. The shop had two pieces that if we were careful we would be able to cut the letters from the stock without an issue. Everyone knows how that goes. In shipping, the material received a nasty scratch right across the face of the material. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Good thing our metal guy knows what he is doing. Sure, we could have returned it with no financial impact but we really needed this material. Because the material was solid in color throughout the material, we took a very fine burnishing wheel to the material and after about two hours had a beautiful piece of 1970’s gold tone aluminum.
Mounting this sign required us to use double sided tape for the logo and stud mounting for the letters. The tape was perfect because there really wasn’t much weight from the acrylic even thought the design was a bit of a puzzle. With both we had created a template so this took a few minutes to straighten it out and it looks great.
If you need a custom lobby sign for your business please give us a call. We can be reached at 262.289.9481 or email us at info@optimumsignswi.com. We would love to help with your project.
