A new sign for the new shop

I always find it hard to do design work for something I am to close to. This could be friends business ventures other businesses I have been involved with or most certainly for my own sign shop. In the last five or six years I have designed over a dozen logos but haven't decided to use any of them. Part of it is being to critical as most of them would have worked fine. But this was different since we now have a new shop that needed signs and I didn't want to be without for to long. So instead of expecting a complete branding make over I decided to just design new signs and get them up. I wanted both signs to be lit just for good effect at night even though we only leave the lights on for a few hours after dark.

Here is a shot of the big wall sign. It is made with 3/4" bevel edged solid pvc letters with a second black backer layer of aluminum composite. The letters are mounted on a custom fabricated steel frame that allows it to float about 6" off the wall. This sign was intended to be visible from the highway so simple & large with color good contrast worked beautifully. We have been building a few of these in the last few years with great success.  The second of our new signs was made to be viewed from up close once you have come down the driveway. I have always loved sandblasted redwood for a sign background because the texture gives such a great contrast to the rest of the design. Unfortunately we have cut down most of the worlds redwood and what little bit is left is expensive and  hard to find. We happen to have some friends at Bensonwood Homes who use a lot of industrial recycled woods and have been working through a stock of 3" clear vertical grain redwood that had been hugh pickle barrels somewhere in the midwest. This shot shows it after planing and after being resawn to 1.75" thick. After some well planed ripping I glued up a panel 40" X 56" to make the sign from. Everything else for this sign came from scap bins here at Keene Signworx. HDU for the main carved gilded letters. Solid prismatic carved acrylic for the word Keene and incise carved lettering with a smalted background for the sub copy panel. After sanding it I prefinished the panel and applied a sandblast mask. Then I did all the dimensional work and cut the mask on the CNC router. Once that step was done we blasted it and applied an oil based stain to the rough blasted background.

Both sets of letters were made separately and applied with a high tech adhesive. After lot of fussing we had a new sign to go with the new shop...now maybe a new logo…