Over the years, I’ve negotiated a few commercial leases. Almost as important as the price/sq ft discussion is the haggling over signage. Signage is naturally a big requirement for most businesses leasing space. Where can a sign be placed? How big can it be? Can the sign be colored and in the companies font? Can it be lit at night? Is it lit with halo lighting or are they colored letters? A great deal of time and effort is placed on signage. So much so, that I was stunned when I saw the recent painting of the buildings at the Target Center at Frank Lloyd Wright and Loop 101 in Scottsdale.
This Target Center is your normal strip mall with Target being the main anchor, followed closely by an Albertson’s grocery store. It used to be painted with some beige colors and was honestly a tad boring. Recently, they have attempted to give the center a face lift with some new desert colors. Sadly, I think they’ve failed miserably. I’ll explain:
Here’s the Blockbuster sign against it’s new yellow background:
That’s right, they painted it yellow, which works miserably with the yellow Blockbuster letters. My Photoshopping skills are probably a little too good, because the contrast here actually makes the sign look readable, but trust me…there are times of the day where all you see is a wall of yellow.
Perhaps you are thinking Blockbuster just got unlucky. Nope: Starbucks was equally affected:
That’s right…green paint for Starbucks. The green paint here matches the Starbucks green very, very well. I’m sure they are equally thrilled. Not to be left out, all of these business have red letter signs, to match perfectly with the new red paint:
It baffles me how the paint colors seem to have been chosen to make all of these business’s signs fade away into nothing. Even more curious, the same colors could have been used, but at different locations, so that none of the (current) businesses were adversely affected. Although, to be honest, red paint is probably always a bad idea in any location where a sign is likely to be used.
They aren’t done painting yet (you can just see a painter touching up the yellow trim on that last photo), but I’m already wondering when a new paint scheme will be arriving.
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Looks like someone took the “bright desert-y earth tones are all the rage” maxim a little too far.
It was starting to look like a real dump. It looks much better. I wish Ice Tango was still open however.
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