Tip for Today #4: What is a Channel Letter?
Channel letters can extend the brand story, utilizing fonts, logos, materials, and colors. They are however limited to the location, visibility and the code allowance. The name channel letter derives from how the sign is created or fabricated. And when you cut it in half, it creates a channel-like appearance .
Channel letters consist of backs, returns, lighting engines, and faces.So there’s lots of illumination that you can do, if you choose illumination. Channel letters do not have to be illuminated at all. You can do LED and there’s various colors that you could do from reds to blues, greens, whites, different shades of whites. There’s also vintage illumination, which we go into the neon, or you could do the marque style illumination.
The types of channel letters that we can do are face lit channel letters, back lit channel letters. A hybrid mix of the two being face lit and back lit. And also we could do open face channel letters with the exposed, typically you would do a neon or the marquee vintage style illumination.
A new trend of channel letter that’s been really starting to gain traction is a digital channel letter where we’ll actually populate the face of the LED with a digital board. These LEDs can display a motion picture or an image. Another type of channel letter is an illuminated return. And what that’ll do is your illumination comes on the return of the letter.
It identifies the brand, it draws in clientele. It identifies that sign to that experience.