SoHi Style

Roughly 30 miles northwest of Cincinnati, Oxford, OH, home of Miami University, provides the ideal combination of amenities often enjoyed in a college town – big-city culture with small-town ambience. However, in an effort to maintain certain aesthetic, officials in such locales often enact strict sign codes to create a certain flavor (where that “flavor” helps local commerce is up for debate).

Rather than fighting city hall, Jeff Waggoner, a longtime environmental-graphic designer (EGD), and a team of colleagues worked within Oxford’s prescribed code to create distinctive signage for SoHi (in Oxford parlance, this contraction means “South of High Street.”) Sandwiches. The owner, Nick Lanni, had founded the Great Steak & Potato Co. franchise, and his sons, Joe and John, operate Currito, a chain of quick-service, gourmet-burrito outlets. Nick’s wife, Nancy, sought to purchase the original Oxford Great Steak & Burrito location and “reinvent the Philly cheesesteak concept,” Waggoner said.

Waggoner teamed with former FRCH Design colleagues Katie Stapleton and Terri Altenau. Stapleton and Altenau assumed creating the building’s interior design, while he focused on branding, EGD and logo design.

Located within Oxford’s historic district, internal illumination is forbidden, and no project signs are allowed. Also, although the district allows window graphics, it also frowns upon promotional, cling-vinyl applications.
Waggoner said, “The storefront had to be carefully considered. In a three-block radius, no fewer than 12 other restaurants compete for students’ limited dollars. We decided that large light fixtures would detract from the sign’s stainless steel and the building’s clean architecture.”

Working within these constraints, Waggoner designed the logo as a rectangular, brushed-stainless-steel container that comprises uses letterforms and negative space to form the logos. Advance Sign Group (Columbus, OH) fabricated the sign to project in a subtle way while conforming to code. To brighten the signface without running afoul of codes, Advance embedded high-output LEDs within the awning’s top using an open channel to provide accent lighting. Unexpectedly, the lighting creates a striped pattern atop the stainless-steel face, which creates additional aesthetic appeal.

The awning, which Canvas Awnings by Zum (Middletown, OH) produced, uses stainless-steel support brackets, which feature the SoHi logo stencil-cut using waterjet or CNC-laser-cutting processes. Fabricators decorated the negative building’s sign’s negative space with PPG urethane coating and ½-in.-thick, acrylic, flat-cut-out letters attached to the face with 3M’s VHB tape.

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To create window graphics, Sign Connection (Dayton, OH) used 3M translucent, bronze, light-beige, lime-green and orange vinyl that’s brightened by SoHi’s interior lighting.