In Austin, you can’t go wrong with a sign that references the city’s music legacy. Austin City Limits, the iconic PBS live-performance show, has wowed rock, blues and country fans for nearly 40 years, and spawned the ACL Music Festival, which takes place in Austin’s picturesque Zilker Park. Also, the South by Southwest (SXSW in hipster lingo) festival, which launched in 1987 and occurs every March, attracted more than 80,000 fans last year, and SXSW now attracts thousands of information-technology and film buffs as well.
And, attention-grabbing signs aren’t only encouraged in Austin; frankly, they’re expected. So, even an apartment-building ID sign must engage passersby. A signface shaped like a guitar’s head effectively attracts crowds in Austin. The Houston office for Transwestern, a real-estate-management company, hired Austin-based Ion Art to fabricate a distinctive pole sign for The 704, its rental property on S. Lamar Blvd. in Austin.
Ion Art partnered with Janke Design, an Austin-based design firm, which devised the program using Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW software.
Ion Art fabricated the metal cabinet and its aluminum face with a MIG welder, plasma cutter and CNC router, and painted the cabinet in the shop’s custom paint booth. Ion Art installed neon tubing around the cabinet and directional arrows’ perimeter, and created its lettering from neon and cold-cathode tubing.