Channel letters are what most people picture when they picture a storefront sign: individual illuminated letters mounted to your building, readable from the road, day and night. They're the default for retail, restaurants and anything on a street where people are driving past at 35 miles an hour.

We've been fabricating them in Colorado since 2003. Ours are built in our shop in Englewood — the returns, the faces, the trim cap and the lighting. Most of the national franchises take your order and send it to a wholesale fabricator out of state. That difference shows up when something needs fixing three years later.

The four ways they get lit

Front-lit is the standard: a translucent acrylic face, lit from inside, glowing at night in your brand color. It's what you see on nine out of ten storefronts, and it's the most cost-effective option.

Halo-lit — also called reverse pan channel — puts an opaque metal face on the letter and throws the light backward against the wall, so the letter reads as a dark silhouette inside a glow. It looks considerably more expensive than it is and works best on a clean, light-colored wall.

Front-lit and halo-lit combined does both, for maximum presence at night.

Open-face neon is real glass tube sitting in an open letter can. Very few shops in the country still build these and almost none in Denver, because it requires someone who can bend glass. We can, in our own shop. If you want a sign that nobody driving past will mistake for anyone else's, this is it.

How they mount

Direct-mounted letters attach individually to the wall with the wiring run behind it — the cleanest look, and what most landlords prefer. A raceway is a horizontal enclosure that holds the letters and the electrical, mounted as one unit; it's required when you can't make many penetrations in the facade, and it's faster to install and to service. A backer panel puts the letters on a shaped background, which helps when your wall is busy, dark, or a color that fights the sign.

Which one you get is often decided by your landlord's sign criteria rather than by preference. Send us the criteria document with your inquiry and we'll design to it the first time.

Permits, and why they matter here

Channel letters are electrical signs attached to a building, so they need a permit almost everywhere on the Front Range, and Denver, Englewood, Littleton and Sheridan each do it differently. We do the shop drawings and pull the permits. If you're in a historic district or a planned center, there's design review on top of that, and it's better to find out before fabrication than after.

Installation

We install with our own 35-foot bucket truck and our own crew, so your install date isn't hostage to a subcontractor's schedule. We also service and reface channel letters we didn't build.

Channel letters are quoted per letter, based on letter height, depth, lighting type and mounting. Send us your logo or a photo of the storefront and we'll come back with a real number.