Dimensional letters — the raised, often illuminated lettering you see on shopfronts and reception walls — look simple once installed. The process behind them is where the quality is decided.
It starts with a vector file, and it has to be clean
A router or laser follows a path. It cannot interpret intent. That means the artwork has to be true vector outlines, not a traced bitmap, and the paths have to be closed and free of duplicates. A logo pulled off a website and auto-traced will have hundreds of tiny nodes and wobbling edges, and the machine will faithfully cut every one of those wobbles into the material.
This is the single most common delay on a dimensional letter job, and it's why we'd always rather have your original logo files than a JPEG of them.
Choosing the process: router or laser
They're not interchangeable.
- CNC router — a spinning cutter removes material. Handles thickness well: acrylic, aluminium composite, timber, PVC. The right choice for most letter bodies and anything structural.
- CO2 laser — a focused beam burns through. Superb edge quality on acrylic, leaving a flame-polished edge straight off the machine, and it holds fine detail a router bit physically can't reach into.
Bit diameter is the constraint people miss on routing. A cutter has a radius, so it cannot produce a perfectly sharp internal corner — there'll always be a small radius where two lines meet. On a tight serif or a narrow counter (the enclosed space in an "a" or "e"), that matters, and it's a reason to move a job to the laser or adjust the artwork.
Building depth
Flat-cut letters are exactly what they sound like — cut from sheet, painted or faced, mounted to the wall on studs. Fabricated letters are built up: a face, a returns wall around the perimeter, and a back, assembled into a shallow box. That box is what makes illumination possible.
Lighting it
Two main approaches, and they read very differently at night:
- Face-lit — LEDs behind a translucent acrylic face. The letter itself glows. This is what you see on most retail shopfronts.
- Halo-lit (reverse-lit) — the face is opaque, LEDs point backwards at the wall, and the letter is silhouetted against a glow. More restrained, and it reads as more premium in most settings.
The Infinity Motors letters we produced are face-lit — an orange translucent face over a clear acrylic body, so the letters carry brand colour by day and light through in the same colour after dark. Getting that colour consistent in both states is a materials decision made well before anything is cut.
Why in-house matters
Owning the router and the laser means the machining sits in our own schedule, not a third party's. If a letter comes off the machine and the corner radius isn't right, we recut it that afternoon rather than sending it back and waiting a week. It also means we can prototype — cut one letter, look at it under real light, adjust — which is difficult to justify when every iteration is an outsourced order.
If you're planning dimensional signage, the most useful thing you can send us early is your logo in its original vector format, plus a photo of the wall or fascia it's going on. Those two things determine most of the decisions above.