HOW-TO
By Peter Perszyk
Design
Give it
some Glass
Glass can add class to many sign projects.
A
t an early age in my long and illustrious sign career, I began reading about sign faces that were actually created with glass. The UL 48 code even made mention of this (citing its “great insulating properties”). However this logic was not so clear to me. After all, wasn’t acrylic lighter? Wasn’t polycarbonate less breakable? But then again, glass was always much clearer, and compared to plastics, it just had class.
Make it with Glass A gentleman hailing from a former Eastern Bloc country once filled me in on the choice of glass for sign faces. He told me that it was “flat,” “rigid,” and “low-tech.” In countries that had glass production for windows, they also had the ability to make glass sign faces. If you already worked
with glass, then it was easy to use it for sign faces (which he did). The assumption has always been that the oldstyle glass face would just slide into a frame, and the finished sign may not have shown much difference between glass and plastic. However architecture has worked with, utilized, and even pushed the limits of glass use in recent years (Photo 1). Glass is no longer just in the “windows,” and today, windows no longer have to look mundane. In fact, glass has become an integral element to the design (Photo 2). When it comes to modern sign design, one advantage of using glass is in its thickness, which acts as a visual enhancement. For instance, glass thickness equates to a strength greater than that of plastic sheets (Photo 3). And whereas a sheet of plastic more than likely will need a frame to act as a retainer, glass holds
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Sign Builder Illustrated // January 2013
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