Googie Christmas Sign

Jan 10

My love of Mid Century Modern design is personified in Googie Architecture. After building a Motel sign for my Kitchen earlier in the year I had been desperate to scale up to a larger build. I set about looking for inspiration and found this Civic Pharmacy sign in Ottawa, the original sign actually had rotating letters on the top as “Civic” is a palindrome. I wasn’t going to try recreating that but loved the basic design.

I jumped into Photoshop and with Christmas coming up I had a wonderful, awful idea. It was only awful as I only had a few weeks to build it before the beginning of December and would have to stop work on my 57 Chevy that’s I’m trying to get back together. So the plan was formed.

First job was to set about getting the materials ordered. Rather than paint the letters on the sign I had an idea to use vinyl so I could change it later. I got in touch with Steve at Bad Yeti Kustom Print who had been so helpful with my arcade machine and he straight away got what I needed and set to work on the cutting machine. Next to order was acrylic which came from The Acrylic Store, there was a slight glitch with my order but I found the customer service excellent and they soon made it good. The backlights were outdoor LED strip from Amazon. If I were to build it again I think I would use LED tubes to make it look more authentic but they did the job. I had most of the wood I needed but wasn’t sure what to use for the posts. In the end I found some half round decking railing which worked out great and I was able to route out a channel for the mains cable. There is quite a bit of build footage in my story highlights over on Instagram but here is a 30 second summary of how it went.

My top tip from the build was from Wesley Treat and that is to use a 45 degree bit on a router to get perfect mitre joins. Everything else came together well I did some ageing/weathering on the sign to make it look like it had been around for many years.