ARCHIVE: Category Archive for: Design/Build

Keeping Up With the Signage Industry

It’s not easy staying current in the fast-paced world of business signage. That’s why the team at Metro Sign and Awning likes to take time when possible to visit with colleagues and take advantage of trade shows with educational opportunities like the upcoming Digital Signage Expo at the Las Vegas Convention Center, March 10-13, 2015. We like to keep abreast of current and future trends in our industry, including advanced display technologies, best practices, and new thoughts on how to meet the needs of our retail customers. This particular show offers the 4,000 or more signage industry professionals who attend plenty of collaborative peer-to-peer “Idea Exchanges,” bolstered by lectures and panel presentations, seminars, and roundtable-format discussions. The schedule this year

Did you know that Metro Sign and Awning works with many hotel and restaurant owners to create semi-temporary enclosures that add a degree of weather-proofing to their outdoor areas? Properly done, these enclosures extend the outdoor seating season and thereby add revenue for restaurants. They’re able to contain heaters placed in the enclosed area, as necessary, to allow the space to be used quite comfortably during the colder months, here in New England. We’ve also worked with hotels to create enclosures to block the wind and weather around pick up / drop off areas. This makes hotel ingress and egress for guests and visitors far more inviting and hospital. Material Choice Important For many of the enclosures we use “Weathertyte”

Metro Sign and Awning’s designers are expert at managing the many nuances that help create extra value and excitement in your signage. Here’s an example…

Another Way To Improve Signage ROI – Add Quality and Features!

Any business is inherently interested in knowing the return on investment (ROI) for the important actions it’s considering, because doing those calculations not only makes it easier to choose among different strategies, but also helps identify which of several possible actions should be prioritized and which ones are better delayed. With signage, you can do two varieties of ROI calculations: ROI in comparison with other advertising expenditures Pure financial ROI in comparison with any type of expenditures If you haven’t already, by the way, you can check out your signage ROI with our unique Business Sign R.O.I. Calculator. Either way, you’ll find that the cost of signage is relatively small compared to all the other expenditures you are making to

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which first became the law of the land in 1991, has made incalculable improvements in the lives of countless people. More recently revised in 2010 and made mandatory as of March 15, 2012 for virtually all new construction and renovations, the ADA has resulted in a system of “best practices” that make it possible for disabled persons to access and enjoy an extremely wide range of public and private built environments. Many people think the ADA just requires Braille on certain signs, but it’s considerably more comprehensive than that. Compliance can impact a great many of your project’s signage (and design/construction) specifications. Unfortunately, the ADA’s requirements are sometimes ambiguous. That’s one reason Metro Sign

It’s hard to drive or walk far in today’s built-up areas without encountering a pylon sign, sometimes called a pole sign or a roadside sign. As the name implies, this is single- or double-sided signage supported above ground level on some kind of slim vertical support. Along highways, pylon signage can tower 200 feet or even higher. In urban areas, they’re likely to top out at 30 feet or so, the better to be visible to foot traffic and to link the sign’s messaging more closely to a particular piece of real estate. The pylon sign itself usually consists of an illuminated sign cabinet supported by one or two unembellished poles, which may be square, round, or of an interesting

How Many Kinds of Signs Can You Name? There are more than 206 bones in the human body, each one with its own name, from cranial bones to vertebrae, and from the vomer to the clavicle. That’s more bones than types of signage, but our industry nevertheless can marshal quite a line-up of different ways to convey messages to people. How many different types of signs can you name? Below are some photos, with a link that lets you see what that type of sign is called. Sign Type 1: This high-profile sign is the kind you’ll see outside many developments, such as shopping centers, highway service establishments, or multi-tenant commercial parks. Depending on circumstances and visual

With a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Corey Fisher is a man who knows how to make things. He enjoys the challenges that come with the signage industry and takes pride in the products he helps create. Corey first started with Metro Sign and Awning about 10 years ago as a technician, a role which soon developed into an estimating position. About a year later, an opportunity arose for Corey to join in partnership with the existing owners: Brian Chipman and Tom Dunn. “Throughout school, I was always interested in CAD design and CNC machining, which just so happens to have many applications within the signage industry today,” says Corey, “so I asked Brian and Tom

Working With General Contractors – Our Safety Program

It’s a little bit too technical for the kind of blog this is primarily intended to be, but for a long time we have wanted to write up something about the extensive efforts we make to keep ourselves qualified for work with General Contractors. As you may know, GCs on major construction projects are subject to a wide range of standards and specifications that control not only how they operate, but how the subcontractors they hire (that would be us!) must also operate. If we don’t conform to their high standards, GCs simply cannot trust us with any work. So we here at Metro Sign and Awning spend a considerable amount of time, effort, and resources making sure we’re qualified

If you’d watched us work for the past couple of weeks, you might’ve thought we were going around in circles. And in a way, you’d be right. We’ve been working on another large wayfinding signage project, and the number of details outnumber the number of signs by about a thousandfold. We’re not complaining, or bragging – that’s just the way wayfinding projects (and most others, really) seem to go. If you’d like to see a few of the details and understand some of the principles behind a wayfinding signage project, the AIA (American Institute of Architects) created an overview document a few years ago, which is now freely available. If you have questions about wayfinding signage or would like to