Guy Fieri’s Times Square Restaurant Signage Stakes Bold Claim

First incorporated in 2007, Image One Industries focuses on fabricating outdoor, electric signage, and interior graphics and imaging. We operate a 130,000-sq.-ft. production space, as well as 14,000 sq. ft. of office space, and employ a staff of approximately 100.

We’re located approximately 80 miles from NYC, and have installed sign programs extensively within the Big Apple. Our portfolio includes signage at Radio City Music Hall, the Walgreen’s Times Square sign, and Wells Fargo Bank’s Penn Station location, among others.

An opportunity arose when Heartland Brewery, a NYC brewpub with seven locations, partnered with celebrity chef Guy Fieri, the star of Food Network’s Diners, Dives and Drive-Ins, to develop the concept for Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, a bistro on 44th St. in Times Square, whose menu features seafood, chicken wings, steaks and sauces that reflect Fieri’s feisty culinary style and personality.

Heartland solicited bids to create a distinctive sign program that would match the restaurant’s saucy fare. Based on a competitive bid and testimonials from our many NYC customers, we earned the job. Niemitz Design, a Boston-based, graphic-design firm, developed the project’s concept design.

Kevin Shaw, our director of imaging and design, collaborated with Kim Nathanson, Niemitz’s project designer, to interpret conceptual sketches into templates for sign fabrication. The outside-the-box concept features signage welded together and displaying license plates, beer cans and car bumpers. The entire concept spans 1,645 sq. ft. We converted the sketches into workable documents using CorelDRAW, Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop and Illustrator) and Rhino 3-D software.

Our experience with NYC sign installations has taught us to hire a local licensed installer and a permit expeditor. For this job, we hired M & G Permitting Services (Holbrook, NY), a firm that’s very familiar with the permits required to work in Times Square. They made the process seamless.

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The sign comprises four distinct elements: a horizontal, perforated-metal canopy: a medallion-shaped sign with the restaurant logo; a throwback, pointing-arrow blade sign; and a high-resolution, LED displayboard.
We anchored the arrow sign to the wall with 6 x 6-in., steel tubes, which we paired with matching components that connect to the stub-outs that were already welded to the building’s steel structure.
We MIG-welded the sign’s frame together from the 4 x 4- and 1.5 x 1.5-in., steel skeletons, and covered the structure with an 0.080-in.-thick, aluminum skin.

The client very clearly wanted the arrow to look like an old-school, urban blade sign; thus, it would feature exposed neon. We implemented a combination of EGL 13mm, ruby-red, noviol-gold and triphosphor-white luminous tubing. We painted the sign – as we did all of this job’s components – with Akzo Nobel two-part, acrylic-polyurethane paint.

Demand for neon has certainly waned with LEDs’ continuous evolution, but there’s still a market for it on certain projects, such as exposed-tube signs, where the customer wants a specific, retro look. We powered the sign with 9000V, 60mA France electronic transformers.

We built the 16 ft. 9 in.-diameter, medallion sign from 0.080-in., aluminum sheet, which we cut to shape on our AXYZ Series 8000 CNC routers. We secured it over 2 x 2 x 1/8-in., aluminum-tube support frames in two pieces for shipping.

We crafted the medallion’s eagle from a sculpture of flattened beer cans and license plates. Niemitz’s original design called for crushed beer cans, but mounting them without water and dirt accumulating inside them could’ve proven problematic. We reviewed the concept, and determined that flattening them instead would prevent water from penetrating the surface. We tiled the beer cans and license plates on the eagle to create a watershed that directs water away from the surface.

After having pressed the cans with a roll press, we fastened them to the medallion’s aluminum face with rivets. To create an aged face on the medallion, we created a faux finish made from mixing various Akzo Nobel colors manually, and then applied them with rollers and by hand. Gold neon illuminates the “Guy’s” logo at the sign’s center, and the white neon halo-lights the Chevy grille that creates the subtle, yet powerful, background.

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The horizontal sign at the base of the entry statement features “American”, which comprises facelit channel letters brightened with SloanLED white modules. We decorated the face with 3M Panaflex™ 945 flexible-face material printed on our Epson GS6000 solvent-ink printer. Like the medallion, the “Guy’s” logo features exposed, double-stroke, gold neon, which is installed on a digitally printed graphic with an applied faux-finish to create a distressed effect. For the canopy sign’s base layer, we installed 16-gauge, galvanized-steel mesh with a diamondplate pattern, and covered it with a black Akzo Nobel coating.

We hired D3 LED (NYC) to design and build the 16 x 9-ft. electronic message center. For ultra-crisp resolution, they used 10mm modules. The display, which is controlled on the premises, features Guy Fieri-branded content and photos, and descriptions of highlighted menu items.

We hired National Sign & Lighting (Old Bethpage, NY) to complete installation. Working with them, we exposed the structural steel that supports the building, welded our attachments and restored the building to its original condition. We completed the job on a strict timeline. Over a July and August fortnight, we completed the installation at night. To say the least, installing an exterior sign during midday at Times Square would be challenging.

One of the project’s more interesting challenges was sourcing the license plates. Finding the beer cans was easy (although dumping the contents of 100 cans down the drain left us with mixed emotions), but the plates were more difficult because every state requires that license plates be returned. It was difficult to find plate collectors willing to part with their plates. After negotiating prices with several collectors, we procured the 75 plates needed.

Selecting the car grille required extensive research. We, along with Heartland and Niemitz, searched through car books that featured models from the ’40s through ’70s to decide what models would
be considered quintessentially “All-American”. Eventually, we settled on what many would agree are classics: a ’56 Chevy Bel Air, a ’65 Camaro, and Chevrolet and Ford F-150 trucks.

Fabricating signage for Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar required an accelerated timeline, and considerable research, because it’s an unorthodox project. But, it’s very satisfying to see our work standing out in Times Square, one of the world’s most dynamic signage environments, for a high-profile program such as a celebrity chef’s restaurant.
 

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Equipment and Materials
Coating: Grip-Gard two-part, acrylic-polyurethane paint, from Akzo Nobel (Norcross, GA); www.signfinishes.com  
Equipment: Sheetmetal flattener and MIG welder, from building-supply and home-improvement stores
Lighting: Noviol-gold, ruby-red and tri-phosphor white, 13mm, 120V neon luminous tubing, from EGL (Berkeley Heights, NJ), (908) 508-1111 or www.egl-neon.com; white LED modules, from SloanLED (Ventura, CA), (888) 747-4533 or www.sloanled.com; electronic, 60mA transformers, from France (Fairview, TN), (800) 753-2753 or www.franceformer.com  
Messageboard: Stackable, 10mm, modular display, provided by D3 LED Systems (NYC), (888) 992-3533 or www.d3led.com  
Metal: Galvanized-steel, perforated, 16-gauge, diamondplate-steel mesh, aluminum sheet and aluminum support tubing, from building- and sheetmetal-supply shops
Printer: Stylus Pro GS6000 solvent-ink printer, from Epson (Long Beach, CA), (800) 463-7766 or www.epson.com
Router: AXYZ Series 8000 CNC router, from AXYZ Intl. (Burlington, ON, Canada), (800) 361-3408 or www.axyz.com
Software: CorelDRAW!, from Corel Corp. (Ottawa, ON, Canada); www.corel.com; Adobe Creative Suite, from Adobe (San Jose, CA), www.adobe.com; Rhino 3-D, from Robert McNeel & Assoc. (Seattle), (206) 545-7000 or www.rhino3d.com
Vinyl: Panaflex flexible-face material, from 3M Commercial Graphics (St. Paul, MN), (888) 364-3577 or www.3mgraphics.com