Installation on VDOT Right-of-ways

Just had a call from a customer letting us know that someone from the Va. Dept. of Transportation told one of his employees at the subdivision we recently installed signs that the signs we installed last week were all on VDOT Right of Way.

I called Fralin and Waldron to try and get to the bottom of this. I personally put the flags up in the locations (agreed upon by customer and myself several weeks back) so Sign Design is "at fault" for getting the signs too close to the ROW and therefore we would normally be responsible for moving them out of harms way. (By that I mean that signs in the state ROW are sometimes removed by state crews and taken to storage somewhere in Salem). I think that this is mainly because the state is maintaining the ROW and these signs are in the way of mowing operations or sight distances etc.

The customer is doing us a favor by having his men move the signs back to 5 feet behind the curb. Apparently one of the VDOT boys told his man that having them 5 feet behind the curb will take them out of the ROW.

This may or may not be true since the ROW normally includes all of the street improvements (back of curb to back of curb) plus additional room for storm sewers etc. For instance the back of curb to back of curb measurement at this particular subdivision may be 35 feet, but the ROW may be 50 feet. In a perfect world, there would be 7 -1/2 feet behind the curb to the ROW. I have been told that sometimes the actual road improvements are not centered within the ROW- but usually they are.

The bottom line is this-

If we do not have a dimensional site plan of the area so we can actually scale the location of the ROW from some known object like a curb or a drop inlet, we really do not know where that line is. Nor does anyone else except a surveyor. We should advise our customer that they need to have their signs off of the ROW, but ultimately we should put them where the customers ask us to. JUST BE SURE WE ADVISE THE CUSTOMER CORRECTLY.

All Design Programs Are Not Created Equal

The computer design programs that come packaged with computers are not really designed to create graphics as large as a sign. They work great for small printed matter like letters or business cards, but here is what a tree graphic provided by one of our customers as "camera ready artwork" looked like when we get a little closer...see the problem? All of those pixels magnify as the graphic is made large enough for a sign...

The design programs we use allow us to design graphics that can be blown up to the size of buildings with no loss of resolution...and that, in a nutshell, is why we charge for graphic design. We take the ideas customers come up with, then convert those ideas into images that will look beautiful on the end product.

I always have a difficult time explaining this concept--it always sounds like a cop-out. But truly, for us to make the kind of sign our customers (and we) can be proud of, we have to do it "our" way. Customers tell us (or show us) what they are thinking of, then we can tell them how long it will take us to develop the artwork that will look good on an 8-1/2"x11" paper as well as a 4'x8' sign.

If customers can provide true "camera-ready" art for scanning, we can scan these images as vectors and make it work. Also, we can import eps and ai files as vectors (if they are truly vectors and not just raster images saved as eps and ai files). For more information on formats we can use, see our website at www.signdsign.com.