Aluminium

Focus on

It is safe to say that is the standard for the industry today, it is a versatile and pliant metal that when combined with heavy-duty plastics, create a great signage composite.

As well as the flexibility of the material, are a great substrate to place onto, as you can see here in the picture.

Archive for January, 2007, page 1

Storms Affecting Sign-Making

The recent glut of storms that the UK has been suffering has had a tremendous effect on a variety of services through the country. Planes were grounded (of course), Condoleeza Rice’s plane had to land in 110mph gusts, 11 or so people killed in the storms, trains delayed, and so on.

So far the storms have been a non-starter in Lincolnshire. We had a bit of wind for sure, the heavy metal skip was turned over, and the wooden trailer was turned over too. Other than that it was just a bit of wind for one day and that’s it.

One of the fitting crews had to travel to Hull for a job, travelling over the to do so. They reported that the van felt a little light in places as the wind tried to pick them up, a large van on the bridge was travelling a little bit askew at points, and another one actually turned over, but other than that they didn’t suffer.

Thank God the weather is now a little more clement…

This style of sign belongs to the news category. Click on that link to see more kinds of articles like this one.

Navigation and Sign-Making

It seems a bit of a misnomer to say that we would need any special navigation aids. With producing you might think we’d have the whole navigation lark down to a routine. But then again, we’re not privy to the foibles of the road management departments up and down the country.

Navigating solely using maps however, does seem to be a bit of an ancient method of getting around, especially since some of the maps haven’t been updated for a decade or so. Then, we have the Internet’s version of maps, Google Maps, etc., They’re not exactly perfect and again, not updated every day either.

That’s why recently the subject of using modern navigation aids such as TomTom or other well-known satnav devices has come up with regards to the fitting teams. On one hand you can immediately see the advantages of having them – going door to door with instructions spoken to you. There’s other points in their favour too – if you’re the only person on the job it’s much easier than having to read out written/printed instructions.

Another advantage to mention, the satnav devices tend to be updated just a little quicker than maps, although the main disadvantage I can think of is that some of them aren’t on the ball re updating. Perhaps a method of updating them automatically using wi-fi should be implemented? Many cities ARE wiring themselves up for wi-fi now, after all (take a look at the London wi-fi map, albeit several years old now).

This style of sign belongs to the news,wayfinding signs categories. Click on one of those links to see more kinds of articles like this one.

Language & Signs

In this newly disovered world of multi-culturalism it is becoming more and more common to see signs that are written in more than one language. Being in England doesn’t mean everything you see is just in english, you might catch signs with some farsi on, or arabic, or sanskrit (see here for an example).

As a sign firm it is important that we get the language correct, but since none of us speak or read farsi for example, we are forced to rely upon translations done for us. There are other methods of course, using online translators for example. But many of these are unreliable and can produce some rather embarrassing results as you might imagine.

So as you may understand, sign-makers do go to some extremes to make sure that the language is correct, and not just our own native language(s).

This style of sign belongs to the design,news categories. Click on one of those links to see more kinds of articles like this one.

Font Selection

How many fonts are there?

If you a vague guess you’ll probably be several orders of magnitude off. There are that many it’s mind-boggling. There are several favourites of course, and after reading many articles online and looking at websites you can see that real-life fonts are still popular in online formats. DIN-Medium for example, very popular.

Others that occur frequently are News Gothic MT, Gill Sans MT, Swiss 721 BT, Rotis Semi Serif (one of my favourites), as you can see:

fonts1.gif

This is just six of the common ones we encounter, there are hundreds more that Universities, the , Government bodies, and private industry use – too numerous to count and display here.

So remember, if you are considering ordering your signs through us, and you want a specific font type – please tell us and we will look high and low for it.

This style of sign belongs to the design,news categories. Click on one of those links to see more kinds of articles like this one.