The site survey allows you to see what your sign will look like on location, before you make your final decision, and allows us to give you an accurate estimate.
Take a picture
The first step of the site survey is to take a straight on picture of the sign that can be scaled for a detailed rendering. The small difference of taking a few steps back to get a good picture can save you money by decreasing the amount of design time required for a project.
Take measurements
The next step is to take measurements. The more measurements you can get the better (i.e. width, height, depth, sizes of separate faces, base sizes, retainer size, under-clearance, etc.)
You will need to take a straight on picture of where the sign is going as well as a measurement of something on the same plane. Having measurements on the same plane as where the sign is going is useful for the rendering process, so we can effectively show you how the finished product is going to look to scale.
Not every sign is going to be completely accessible for you to be able to grab all of this information. No worries! Our expert team of service technicians will gladly come by to take a look and offer their opinions on what will and will not work for your location. Any information that can be provided to us beforehand is always greatly appreciated and helps us get our estimates out to you quicker.
If you have any questions, always feel free to call us at 920-731-4852 (4TLC), and we will help you in any way that we can!
Sometimes lit signs go out; it happens, and we will try and get it fixed as soon as possible. There are some steps that you can take to make our process faster and get your sign back to it’s original glory quicker.
Our service technicians rarely do work at night, which in turn makes it difficult to see wich letters are out, without taking the whole sign apart and looking at the bulbs.
A night-time picture before the scheduled service can cut down on the amount of time the technician needs to be on site.
As you can see, a burnt-out sign at night can have a slightly different meaning than in the daytime.
The best time to take a picture of a sign outage is going to be right after sunset (when there is still some natural light). If it is too dark out while taking the picture, most cameras require more time to keep the shutter open to gather enough light. Otherwise the camera only takes light from where it can find it.
Of course our technicians can figure out what is wrong with the sign without a picture, but this is just a helpful way to get things moving forward.
It also provides us with photo documentation so we can tell if there is a pattern in the outages, which could mean that there is a bigger problem such as a bad ballast.
So say you want to have your logo put on a great big sign. Good, you came to the right place! Here are some helpful tips that can help you get that accomplished at the highest possible quality and save you money in design time.
The first thing is to explain the difference between vector and raster graphics.
Raster graphics are basically pictures. They are made up of thousands of small squares called pixels. The resolution of an image is determined by pixels per inch (ppi or dpi). The more pixels per inch, the higher the resolution of the image.
Now, most raster graphics have the resolution optimized for whatever application they were originally intended.
For example, that nice clean looking logo on your website will not work on a sign, as it was designed to be only a couple inches big.
When a raster image is scaled up, it loses quality. The amount of pixels per inch stay the same as the image gets bigger, so those little square pixels get bigger too, creating a fuzz.
A program like Photoshop can cut down on that by inventing new pixels to fill the void, but it will never be 100% quality. (If you’re lucky, you might get around 65%)
Raster images are not the preferred method and usually require one of our designers to recreate or optimize them to work in a large format, which will cost you money.
Helpful Reference Raster images have these file extensions: (.jpg .bmp .png .gif .tif .psd)
What about vector graphics?
Vector graphics are just plain awesome! Vector graphics use a mathematical equation that doesn’t rely on pixel resolution. At any size, they are 100% quality! They work by using a series of points and lines, much like a game of connect the dots (but with a lot more dots and more complex lines than you would probably remember). Graphic designers use vector-based programs like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw close to 100% of the time to make graphics with the highest possible quality.
Because almost all graphics are initially drawn up in a vector-based program, there is a good possibility that whoever designed your logo has either given you the vector file and/or has one saved on their computer. The problem that most people have with finding those particular files is that you can’t open or view them without a program like Adobe Illustrator, which you probably don’t have.buying and selling fakebest replica omega watchesreplica watches online shopping
Here are some of the most common vector file formats (.ai .eps .cdr .pdf) *Note .pdf files don’t always have the vector lines as it is a universal file format.
Now that you know all of this about vector and raster images…. How should the files be prepared? Obviously having vector files is the absolute preferred method (.ai .eps .cdr .pdf). If you do have raster images though, there are still ways to make it work. A raster file (preferably .jpg .tif .psd) that is 150-300 ppi at 50-100% actual size will usually get the job done.
And with the magic that our graphic designers can usually pull, a roughly 5in x 5in 300ppi raster file can be converted to vector format via image tracing reasonably quick as well.
General rule of thumb: Right clicking an image off of a website and doing a “save as” WILL NOT WORK.
The last thing that will need to be taken care of is color. Pantone colors (PMS) are the preferred colors. We have ways to match up the standard Pantone library to the output on our printer so that what you order and what you receive are one in the same. If you don’t have a Pantone color picked out, our printer prints in CMYK inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, black).
If this is all too confusing and you aren’t sure how to check what colors have been used, if a file is going to work or if you just need someone to walk you through what to do, please feel free to ask, and we will be happy to help you out!
Have you ever had to squint really hard to read what was on a sign? We have too, which is why we follow the rules of the distance legibility chart to choose our letter heights.
Obviously not everyone has the same eyesight. This chart is more for the perfect world, everyone has 20/20 vision bare minimum viewing distance, so we will try to keep that in mind. When the chart says the legible viewing distance is 7ft., we will call it 5ft., just to be safe.
