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Recognize the problem to find the solution.
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By Dan Hale
When fabricating illuminated signs, your main goal is to ensure proper lighting, because sign buyers expect illuminated signs to appear equally dynamic in daylight or at night. Thus, choosing and installing the proper light fixtures is imperative. However, face colors, cabinet depth or a signface changeover may require design or specification modifications.
Face replacements
Several years ago, we experienced trouble replacing the faces on an existing, 6 x 10-ft., double-face, 12-in.-wide, aluminum-extruded sign cabinet. The original designer had complied with the standard, cabinet-fabrication rules, that is, placing the fluorescent lamps 12 in. apart, center to center, along the cabinet’s center axis.
The sign’s previous faces comprised black text over a yellow field – not, to my mind, aesthetically pleasing, but certainly bright and readable. The customer’s new face choice was white copy over a blue field. When we tested the refurbished sign, we saw multiple hot spots – you could count every lamp!
Why did we now have hot spots, but none with the previous (yellow) faces? Because warm-colored sign faces diffuse light better than ones with cool colors. The sign’s original yellow field diffused the light, but the new, blue background, a cool color, allowed inborn hot spots to appear.
Some signmakers think you can’t fix such common occurrences, but several solutions exist.
First things first
To solve the hotspot (or shadow) dilemma, you must first determine the problem. If you can easily count the lamps through the sign face, you’re seeing hot spots. If you can’t count lamps, the varying color problem is shadows. Hotspots demand less light, or more diffused light. To cure shadows, simply add light.
On the blue-faced sign, we could count the lamps, so it had hot spots, i.e., too much light. To fix it, we recommended vacuumformed sign faces to our customer, to gain width and lessen the lamps’ effect.
A plastic, vacuumformed sign face is heated and formed into a three-dimensional shape – a flanged flat or a molded, embossed sign face, for example. You can install vacuumformed faces in internally illuminated sign cabinets or channel letters.
Cures for hot spots
• Change to daylight lamps. If the sign had cool-white fluorescent lamps, change to daylight-type lamps. Daylight lamps have a lower lumen yield, and the output color is more conducive to cool-colored faces.
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