Your Voice Inspires Our Reporting on Small Sign Companies

HERE’S THE THING about asking for feedback: You get it. For years prior to this, I’d written many articles and a regular column. I could count on one hand — heck, two fingers — the number of emails I received from readers.

This year that’s changed. We introduced our Brain Squad survey group and have been publishing their contributions since our redesigned April issue. Brain Squad members supply us with not only tips, anecdotes, to-do items and Benchmarks projects, but also questions and “letters to the editor” — all submitted though our monthly surveys.

If you haven’t noticed already, look all over this issue for contributions from your colleagues. And you can join them by signing up at signsofthetimes.com/brainsquad.

Some questions or “letters” we’ve received from Brain Squad members ask us to feature more projects within the range of smaller sign companies. Sure, we all love and are impressed — hopefully inspired, too — by multimillion-dollar sign projects, such those featured in our July cover story. But what about projects for “mere mortal” signshops?

Well, we’ve got some for you this month. And I don’t mean to disparage these projects as “mere” by any stretch. Every kind of sign demands top-notch design, fabrication and installation to fulfill the sign’s intention. Of course, these are easier with some signs than others, but there’s nothing “mere” about the monument signs featured this month or the “mortal-made” projects any month.

Ever since I started on this magazine, I’ve strived to be the voice of realism, checking the impulse of favoring spectaculars and the like with great projects from the other 7/8ths of the sign world — the equivalent of an iceberg’s mass below the surface.

So, please understand that Signs of the Times knows you’re there and we all respect the hell out of what you do.