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Claude Neon Federal’s behemoth entry sign boosts a Native American casino’s signage.
In the fall of 2009, the new manager of the Creek Nation Casino in Checotah, OK, contacted Melissa Mirsaeidi, one of our account executives, to discuss creating a new pylon spectacular to celebrate and announce to their customers that the facility had been recently remodeled.
Claude Neon Federal Signs (CNF) has a long history with the Muscogee Creek Nation tribe. We’ve previously done work not only at this location, but at most of their facilities, including their tribal-government complex, the pylon ID for their Muscogee casino, and interior and exterior signage at their new River Spirit Casino in Tulsa (see ST, May 2010, page 67).
Requirements for the sign included a new, LED videoscreen; a height of 60 ft. for good visibility, and a fire and water theme. They asked for suggestions to change fonts and themes previously used in logos to further set this location apart from its predecessors, so we worked on a freshened look for their logo text as well.
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Betting the house
Using Adobe Illustrator, we created a sign that’s half water and half fire. We wanted to give the customer the “wow factor” they wanted, and what better way to do that than 2,160 linear ft. of animated neon? We “doubled down” on the gas-filled tubes and created a display with the most neon we‘ve used on a single sign in the seven years I’ve been at CNF. We decided that flames of EGL 15mm Clear Gold II and clear red would rise above the 10 x 18-ft. Daktronics Galaxy Pro board. A waterfall of Neo, Horizon and E40 blue neon flow down the pylon cover to the sign’s base.
Our design team fleshed out the template with Illustrator and developed the dimension with the Hotdoor’s CADtools plug-in. The customer gave prompt approval to our plan. Larry Ritz, our vinyl/router department supervisor, also plotted a 6-ft.-tall poster of the neon layout we created with Aries’ Neon Wizard.
Ritz, our tubebenders – Carl Gaebler and Tom Wolski – and I devised a plan to organize the nearly half-mile of neon, which presented one of our biggest challenges. We labeled nearly 500 individual neon units and kept track of them until installation. Using a color-coded scale of drawings, the benders marked off the units when finished and stored them by section on our racks after they’d completed the burn-in process.
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