Dollar Deals
& Max Deals
Two sister discount banners, five stores, one signage system that adapts to every building it lands on.
Max Deals, Bronx. Installed.
No two of these storefronts are alike. A glass condo base with three separate doors. A corner wrapped in a community mural. A 150-foot run of roll gates under an elevated train. The client needed each store to look like part of the same chain anyway, and to open fast.
So instead of designing five storefronts, I designed one kit and adapted it five times. Every exterior is built from the same parts: a colored band, chevron arrows pointing to the name, and LED channel letters only where they count. Every interior gets the same sign family at the same sizes. What changes per store is the color, the length, and how the kit meets the building.
- Exterior: LED channel letter name, 1/2" Sintra chevron and bar band on aluminum, LED spot lights, optional category strip.
- Interior: numbered double-sided aisle boards, category icon hangers, checkout, OTC, store policy and bag check signs.
- Windows: digital print category graphics, door decals with hours and address.
- Color per brand: Dollar Deals in green and yellow or brown and yellow. Max Deals in brown and orange or green and orange.
A condo base with three doors on one frontage, two of them under existing awnings. Rather than replace good awnings, I recovered them with new stripes and lettering and put the lit channel letters only over the center door. Same brand across all three bays, a fraction of the cost.
Left, center and right doors. Recovered awnings on the sides, channel letters over the center.
Window graphics, one panel per product category.
A 75'-6" frontage in a zone that caps the sign at 50 sq ft. The answer that became the template for the whole chain: the lit channel letters stay inside the limit (15'-4" by 3'-3", 49.8 sq ft), and the band that carries the brand across the full length is unlit Sintra with printed chevrons, washed by six spot lights. The store reads 75 feet wide. The permit reads 50.
Full-length band, 50 sq ft lit sign area, and a side wall panel for the approach.
Aisle boards: number, brand bar, and three to five categories each.
Left: checkout, OTC, policy and bag check. Right: category icon hangers and door decal.
The biggest facade in the set: a corner store wrapping three streets, 113'-10" on Broadway alone, sitting above a mural the neighborhood cares about. The band runs above the mural and never touches it. The wall behind the band is painted brown by the client's own crew, and the sign mounts straight to it, which kept the scope to letters, bars and 23 spot lights. This store gets the brown and yellow version of the palette to sit calmly over the mural.
Three elevations, with the band held above the existing mural.
Same interior kit in the brown palette, plus an LED flex neon department sign.
The second banner. I explored several logo directions for the sister brand before landing on the italic MAX with chevron underlines, so it reads as related to Dollar Deals without being a copy.
Early logo explorations.
The storefront applies the same rule as the Dollar Deals Bronx store, in a C1-4 zone with the same 50 sq ft cap: 19'-4" by 2'-7" of lit letters, 74'-10" of brand. Horizontal Sintra bars give the brown band texture, and the orange chevrons carry the eye to the name from both ends.
74'-10" band, 50 sq ft sign area.
The interior kit, re-skinned in brown and orange.
Installed. Aisle boards hanging over the shelves.
A 151'-6" run of roll gates under an elevated train, where most of the facade is shutters. The name gets a 17' lit channel letter box at the center. On either side, long category strips in 3D Sintra (Food, Linen, Bath, Kitchen and more) fill the frontage and tell people riding past what's inside. This store uses the green and orange version of the palette.
151'-6" of frontage: lit name at the center, category strips on both sides.
Left: interior kit in green. Right: window graphics and door decal.