July 17, 2020

Bristol based Voodoo DesignWorks reached for the Metamark MDT to deliver a decidedly innovative interior illuminated sign to its client Total QSR…

Total QSR is one of those household names that few outside its industry will know, but that we’d all be lost without. If you’ve ever eaten outside the walls of your own home, chances are that Total QSR will have had a hand in maintaining the industrial strength catering hardware that helps keep the establishment you were eating at running. Total QSR and its customers are everywhere there’s food and people to whom it’s served.

The team at the Voodoo DesignWorks in Bristol was recently contacted by Total QSR to discuss the provision of some interior signing for the company’s boardroom. The company had a very imaginatively designed logo - based on a cube, three sides visible, and it wanted the flat rendering translating into a real-world physical version of its colourful self and installing as an illuminate wall mounted sign. Physical or not, the sign Voodoo was asked to supply had to be ‘real’ to the extent it had physical dimensions but it couldn’t intrude too far into the boardroom’s space.

Voodoo took the challenge home and contrived a fabrication to be mounted to the boardroom wall. Being lit, it’s would need some depth but the proposed design took advantage of the implied perspective in the design. It would look like the ‘cube’ would look when viewed at an incident angle, whereas for the most part it’d be looked at straight on. That would hide most of the components’ thickness.

The customer liked the idea and, to be scrupulously fair, had suggested most of it! Voodoo set to making it real.

The team at Voodoo set about making three, abstract-shaped slab-light sources fabricated from an engraved ‘light sheet’ able to bleed some light to the rear, and a diffusing acrylic sheet fixed to its front in exact register. The cube’s detail was then printed on Metamark MDT which was adhered to the diffuser. The MDT simply swallows generous ink-loadings and so handled the need for super-saturated, permanently backlit colour brilliantly. Its clean white light-transmitting face film usefully further diffuses the light coming through it too.

Come the day, come the installation. Power was supplied from discrete sources to each of the three ‘shapes’ that were mounted on the boardroom wall. Each shape was arranged so as to look like one of the visible parts of the cube with respect to each of its neighbouring shapes. With the lights flicked on, the logo sits bathed in a pool of light of its own creating. The green colour cuts through and the whole assembly gives the logo standout presence in the boardroom. The printed Metamark MDT is flawless and holds its colour despite the power of the illumination cutting through.

The customer was delighted to see the logo, as conceived, come to life.

Voodoo will be making return visits to Total QSR to install more cubes and a programme of signing and window graphics. Total QSR, they probably have a very experienced engineer not far from you who’s part of the team that’s busy keeping the country cooking.