A cabinet sign is an illuminated box with a face on the front. It's the workhorse of Colorado strip malls, gas stations, service businesses and multi-tenant centers, and it's usually the most sign you can get for the money.

Where channel letters spell your name in individual lit letters, a cabinet puts everything — name, logo, tagline, phone number — on one lit surface. That's cheaper to build, cheaper to install, and far cheaper to change later. If your business name might evolve, or the space might turn over, a cabinet is the pragmatic choice.

Faces

Flat polycarbonate or acrylic with printed or cut vinyl graphics is the standard. Durable, bright, and straightforward to replace when the artwork changes.

Routed faces with push-through acrylic are the upgrade. Your logo and lettering are cut out of the metal face and acrylic is pushed through from behind, so only the letters light up against a solid background. It costs more and looks like it — closer to channel letters than to a printed face.

Pan-formed and embossed faces give the front a raised, molded shape rather than a flat panel. Used where the sign needs some presence but the budget won't reach individual letters.

Single or double face

A wall-mounted cabinet only needs one face. Anything on a pole, a bracket, or hanging perpendicular to traffic needs two, because half your audience is approaching from the other direction.

Multi-tenant cabinets

If you own or manage a center, the cabinet is a tenant panel stack — one structure, individual panels per business. We fabricate replacement panels to match the existing set when a tenant changes, which is a small job that property managers routinely can't find anyone willing to take.

Already have one?

Most cabinets that look dead aren't. Yellowed faces and failed lighting are both fixable without replacing the box, usually for a fraction of the cost of new. See our refacing and LED retrofit page — and if your existing cabinet is structurally sound, start there before you price a replacement.

Permits and power

Cabinets are electrical signs, so they need a permit almost everywhere on the Front Range, and each jurisdiction handles it differently. We do the shop drawings and pull the permits. Wall-mounted cabinets on an existing circuit are straightforward; anything on a new pole means a trench and an electrician, which we'll flag before you budget rather than after.

We install with our own 35-foot bucket truck. Send us a photo of the storefront and the dimensions you're working with and we'll come back with a real number.