Invent­ing New Sign Types for a Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Campus

Steel­Wave was work­ing with a glob­al archi­tec­ture firm Rio, with offices in Los Ange­les, Sin­ga­pore, and Hong Kong to cre­ate a unique sign style that would give the entire cam­pus an indus­tri­al look. The lead architect’s plans includ­ed exte­ri­or signs made from heavy rebar. The size and weight of the mate­r­i­al could be intim­i­dat­ing to work with and required us to come up with sign types that had nev­er been made before.

While rebar is dense and sol­id, it is also frag­ile and can eas­i­ly bend under its own weight. Logis­tics like trans­porta­tion and instal­la­tion also had to be con­sid­ered. The orig­i­nal plan was to flange mount the design on-site, but that would have put the signs at risk of bend­ing or falling, espe­cial­ly giv­en the harsh Col­orado ele­ments. Instead, the rebar was engi­neered to be direct­ly buried sev­er­al feet in the ground to ensure stability.

Work­ing with the archi­tect, we were able to make the idea prac­ti­cal by manip­u­lat­ing the rebar sign’s cas­ing, giv­ing it a sol­id foun­da­tion­al base, and apply­ing a clear coat­ing to the mate­r­i­al. The result? One-of-a-kind signs that set the tone for this mas­sive best-in-class sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy campus.

The rest of SteelWave’s signs were based on the look of the rebar. All inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or signs need­ed to have that same rough, grit­ty, indus­tri­al vibe. The fin­ish­es and paint col­ors of each sign help pull the look togeth­er, but pick­ing those ele­ments out took some back and forth. 

For exam­ple, the back­ing of the room and restroom signs start­ed off as a rough met­al look, but it was ulti­mate­ly tran­si­tioned to a spack­le cus­tom two-col­or. Work­ing direct­ly with the archi­tec­ture firm in Los Ange­les ensured our designs would match the over­all vision as pre­cise­ly as possible.

An ear­ly site walk with the archi­tec­ture firm and Steel­Wave gen­er­al con­trac­tor revealed some nec­es­sary changes to the orig­i­nal sign plan. We noticed the exist­ing dock sig­nage was vinyl on blue rec­tan­gu­lar back­ers. The designs for the new dock sig­nage at that time had been spec­i­fied as brown flat-cut let­ter­ing. Had they stayed that way, they would have matched the build­ing and been near­ly invis­i­ble, which would have made it impos­si­ble for trans­porta­tion crews to read the signs and nav­i­gate the large campus.

The design was updat­ed for new back­ers, paint­ed to match each build­ing and topped with con­trast­ing flat-cut let­ter­ing. The install crew reused the mount­ing points from the orig­i­nal back­ers instead of drilling 100 new stud points if they had been indi­vid­ual let­ter­ing. The quick piv­ot made the signs func­tion­al and cre­at­ed effi­cien­cies in the long run.

The site walk also revealed pos­si­ble foot­ing obstruc­tions, elec­tri­cal access issues, and oth­er dig­ging con­cerns where some of our signs were sup­posed to be installed. Work­ing close­ly with con­struc­tion crews and the archi­tec­ture firm, we adjust­ed sign place­ments and devised workarounds as needed.