Red Sea
Fish Market
A complete storefront identity for a Harlem seafood market, vintage marquee signage outside, an ergonomic bilingual menu system inside.
The full storefront identity: LED acrylic neon crab on the upper facade, warm-white bulb marquee lettering on the sign band.
Red Sea Fish Market is a new seafood market and fry shop opening on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, on a block already crowded with bright backlit plastic signs. The client needed two things at once: a storefront that could out-compete its louder neighbors, and an interior ordering experience that could serve a fast-moving, bilingual customer line.
The building itself set the constraints. A distinctive stone-clad facade offered a rare two-story canvas, but also an irregular substrate that standard mounting details don't cover. Inside, a low 9'-7" ceiling and a tight counter zone meant the menu system had to work overhead, in a space where a poorly angled board would be unreadable behind glare.
The brief spanned the full customer journey: catch the eye from the street, communicate the brand at the threshold, and make ordering effortless at the counter.
The site before intervention: a stone clad facade with no identity at street level.
Three signage directions explored with the client across R1 to R3, before the final marquee concept was selected.
Every neighboring sign on the block is a backlit plastic box. So the brand goes the other way: warm, physical, nostalgic, the vernacular of a classic boardwalk fish market.
Exposed-bulb marquee letters
Open-face channel letters in painted gold aluminum, filled with warm-white LED bulbs capped at 2700K. Against a street of cool blue-white lightboxes, the warm marquee glow reads as older, more established, more trustworthy, exactly what a fresh-seafood brand needs on day one.
A two-story identity
Most storefronts stop at the sign band. Here, the stone upper facade becomes part of the brand: a 5'-6" LED acrylic neon crab mark floats on the second story, visible far down the boulevard, while the 21'-2" sign band carries the full name and offer at street level. Two registers, one identity.
The storefront as menu preview
Digital-print window graphics wrap the glazing with a navy wave and plated-food photography, so the storefront communicates not just the name but the product, before a customer ever steps inside.
Final design elevation: the crab mark, the marquee band, and window graphics working as one composition.
Inside, the design problem shifts from visibility to ergonomics. The menu is the interface between a fast counter line and forty-plus menu items, it has to be readable at a glance, from a natural standing posture, by customers ordering in English or Spanish.
I started from sight lines, not graphics. Mapping average eye height (5'-6") against the 9'-7" ceiling and the 1'-9" counter depth showed that a flat, vertical menu board would sit above the comfortable viewing cone and catch glare from the shop lighting. The answer was built into the mounting system itself: every LED menu frame tilts 30° down toward the customer's eyeline, keeping the full board inside the natural viewing angle and killing reflections, while preserving 6'-1" of clearance for staff working below.
The graphic system is built for operations as much as for customers. Five 2'×3' LED-framed boards organize the menu into clear categories, combos, shrimp, sandwiches, sides, with bilingual English/Spanish item lines throughout. Type sizes follow the standard legibility rule of one inch of letter height per ten feet of viewing distance: item names are sized to read clearly from about 15 feet away, roughly 4.5 meters, so customers at the back of the order line can decide before they reach the counter. Prices are applied as individual vinyl stickers over the printed film, so the owner can change any price in seconds without reprinting a board. A menu that a small business can actually maintain is a menu that stays accurate.
Ergonomic study: viewing cone from average eye height, 30° tilt-down for glare reduction, 6'-1" cashier clearance maintained.
The five-category bilingual menu system, 2'×3' LED frames with sticker-updatable pricing.
Every element was documented to fabrication level, the same drawings the fabricator and installers built from.
- Open-face bulb channel letters: .040 gauge painted-gold aluminum letters and returns, socket-mounted warm-white LED bulbs (2700K max), on a composite aluminum backer with digital-print graphic and 1" square pipe frame.
- LED acrylic neon crab mark: 12mm neon-profile tubing on a composite aluminum base panel with 3'-4" raceway, mounted to the stone facade with 3/8" × 5" lag bolts and shields embedded a minimum of 5", detailed specifically for the irregular substrate.
- Electrical safety: dedicated power supplies, disconnect switch at the sign, concealed L-bracket mounting at engineered spacing.
- Interior LED menu frames: 3/4" square tubing structure with Komatex backing, decorative bolt-cap hardware, and a mounting detail engineered for the shop's curved wall condition.
- Revision management R1 to R7 across six weeks, three full design directions presented, final sizing locked 07/11/25, color and details confirmed 07/12/25 before fabrication release.
Installation section through the facade: channel-letter and neon-letter construction, anchoring, and electrical routing.
Documentation didn't stop at drawings. Before anything shipped, every fabricated element was lit and inspected at the fabricator, each marquee letter checked for bulb spacing, color temperature, and paint finish against spec, and the full crab mark test-lit as one piece. Catching issues on the shop floor costs an email; catching them on a lift over Frederick Douglass Boulevard costs a week.
Pre-shipment quality control at the fabricator: marquee letters and the neon crab mark, lit and verified against spec before installation.
Fabricated and installed per drawings, outside and in.
The installed menu system reads cleanly from the ordering line, with prices the owner can update in seconds. On a block of cool blue lightboxes, the warm marquee glow now marks the market from either end of the street.
Installed condition: the LED menu system in service at the counter.