Grafton, WI – Custom Acrylic ADA Signs for School District | Commercial Sign Co

  This was a fun project.  In the community of Grafton, the schools were in need of some serious work.  The HVAC systems were old and not able to keep up, the interior of the schools needed paint, new tile floors and interior signage.  That is where Optimum Signs came in.

We had worked with the general contractor on a couple of other jobs prior to them receiving this project so they were well aware of our capabilities.  The GC contacted their project manager for the prior project and asked if we would be interested in assisting with the new job which consisted of some 800 interior, ADA signs.  Let me think about this. Yup, we want to be a part of this.

We started with a very large map of the high school because that was going to be our starting point.  The architect had a really good idea of what he wanted and he needed us to apply the ADA standards to his designs.  Yeah, that was the end of his happiness.  He started with a gloss background and embedded room indicators. He also had the room numbers printed on the back of the acrylic so little fingers wouldn’t peel the numbers off the signs.  Sorry, can’t do it.  The ADA is a set of guidelines that ensure that anyone that is visually challenged can “read” the signage.  The background has to be a matte or flat finish and any room indicators must be 1/8″ raised letters or numbers.  Both have to have raised braille directly beneath the indicators.

The only way we can add information that doesn’t change the room designation, is to build a window into the sign. This way the additional information cannot be confused with the room name and indicator.  In this case we created the window with a slide tray that allowed the school to print on a sheet of paper any additional information for the signs.  They can change it as often or as infrequently as they want and they don’t have to have a new sign made.  I find it kind of funny that we put this sign up at the beginning of May and by the end of June they had taped an additional sign over the face of the sign. I wonder what we missed!

If you have a building project that you are working on and you need someone to assist in the design/build of the ADA signage, please give us a call. We would love to help you get the project done on time and on budget. We can be reached at 262.289.9481 or email us at info@optimumsignswi.com.