Tiled shop fascias are becoming incredibly popular these days for many shops and commercial premises as they help make your retail signage stand out from all the other shops along the parade – not to mention the fact that they look awesome! And it’s not just shops which use this method of signage; many restaurant chains and small businesses are using this type of signage as well as it’s relatively easy to produce and the final visual aspect is so rewarding.
In this brief blog case study, we look at the benefits of having a tiled shop sign and whether it’ll work for your commercial premises.
We recently installed a tiled shop sign for a shop in Streatham, London called ‘Bartek Express’ which is a popular small high street business which specialises in selling Polish products and delicacies. The owner of the shop had traded in the area for a number of years and had decided to rebrand their logo and totally refurb the inside of their shop and give the external shop sign a make-over.
The shop sign is the one thing which needs the wow-factor and so no corners should be cut when producing your sign, as like with most businesses, this is the primary advertising platform which displays your brand name so it has to look perfect.
Ensuring that the design, sizing and layout for the letters and logo is usually the hard part and any sign-maker will normally undertake this task. Once this has been finalized, its usually straight forward there after.
After a bit of toing and froing deciding what colour the tiles on the shop sign needed to be for the Bartek Express sign, we were able to draw up the design concept and work out the positioning of the shop sign lettering and logo.
When installing a tiled shop sign, it’s very much the same process as installing a tiled bathroom with the exception of ensuring the tiles and adhesive used are for external use and of a commercial quality. Also, because of the weight of the tiles, you’ll have to ensure that the surface they’re being mounted to can withstand the additional weight. Once you’ve got these factors ironed out, they’re pretty straight forward to install and can be fitted by most qualified and experienced tradesmen. Tiles can be purchased from many tile specialist shops such as www.toppstiles.co.uk however in this case, the client sourced these specific tiles from their own preferred supplier.
After the tiled shop fascia is installed, a frame or border can be used to finish off the tiled surface which usually adds a finishing touch to the sign. It does very much depend on the commercial premises though and whether there’s a decorative border already in place. For this sign, a 50mm border was added around the edge of the tiled fascia as it helped tidy up the edges and it worked well with the overall shop front design.
The main issue with having a tiled fascia is fitting the letters to the tiles as most shop lettering used these days needs to be screwed into place, and when drilling through tiles, they can easily crack and get damaged. If the tiled fascia is being mounted to solid brickwork then it makes it easier to drill through the tiles and use wall-plugs and screws to fix the shop sign letters, however if the tiles are mounted to an existing timber fascia which is slightly raised off the brickwork with timber studwork then it’s very difficult to get a solid fixing for the letters as there’s a hollow gap behind the timber fascia so the letters would need to be bonded flush to the tiles using a strong adhesive.
For the Bartek Express sign, we opted to have the 3D shop sign letters bonded flush to the tiled fascia as it still gave the impression that the letters were protruding out from the sign, and it meant the tiles didn’t have to be drilled and potentially damaged. Also, if the store decided to re-brand again in 5 or 10 years’ time then the letters can be removed and there wouldn’t be any visible holes to the tiles so you could re-apply new lettering to the surface with minimal repair work needed.
One factor which is hard to avoid when installing a tiled fascia is if you wanted to have illuminated shop sign letters. Many shops choose to have signage which has each letter individually illuminated, either with halo-lighting glowing from behind the letters or by having each letter face-lit illuminated, both of which look fantastic – however the problem with this type of illuminated signage is that there needs to be an L.E.D cable which joins up each letter to complete the circuit and when you have a tiled fascia, it’s very difficult to channel the cables into the wall and hide them behind the tiled surface. If you chose not to hide the cables then you’d be able to clearly see this on completion. This isn’t too bad if your logo is joined up or if there aren’t too many letters on the sign, however it can look quite untidy if your sign has many letters.
We had this issue when designing the concept for this Bartek Express sign as the letters needed to be illuminated however we didn’t want to have any visible cables showing on the tiles so we opted to have an external shop sign trough light which was mounted above the sign and which fully illuminated the entire tiled shop fascia.
The clean glossy tiles now create the perfect platform for the 3D letters, which sit nicely and proportionately on the shop sign.
A similar method can be used for other types of signage such as office signs and internal wall signage. Rather than using glossy tiles, many businesses are creating feature walls using stone-effect tiles in a similar way to this sign showing the ‘STORM’ letters mounted onto a slate-effect stone tiled wall.
There’s a whole range of textured tiles, cladding and other materials available from manufacturers from all around the world so if you can imagine it, the chances are you’ll be able to create it!
If you’ve got a project in mind which you’d like to discuss with us then feel free to get in touch.