Lately a lot of my attention has been directed to uses of light in retail applications. Here are some insights I have gleaned.

Which of the five senses is paramount in the mind of the consumer when making the majority of purchasing decisions? You could argue taste for edible products, sound for audio entertainment, or touch for skin care and you might be right, but the vast majority of goods that are bought every day (especially attire, home furnishings, and even some kinds of food items) depend upon their looks to make the cut. How do stores ensure that they look their best, aside from their intrinsic design elements? The answer is lighting, and increasingly that knowledge is being applied to make branding statements that are unique, to attract attention to displays, to foster a certain kind of mood that will enhance sales, and more.

There are 3 basic ways in which lighting will play a larger part than ever in the coming decade in promoting and developing retail sales: the projection of logos and other graphic imagery, the attracting of attention through creating movement and interesting visual statements that change over time; and the actual illumination of product. Of these, the last is also the least interesting to discuss, as I feel that it is often (at this point in time, at least) more science than art. The other two are more worthy of in depth discussion in a forum such as this, and my intent is to thoroughly cover graphics over the next few installments, and then proceed to cueing when it is exhausted.

A Template for the Future
Over the last five years I have been asked to create and deploy dozens of custom templates for clients ranging from investment bankers to retail chains, from dot coms to bat mitzvahs, and from lobbying organizations, to Broadway productions. The applications are nearly limitless, as long as a few basic principles are understood before attempting to utilize this very effective technique.

Templates, also called "gobos" and "cookies" and the more obvious "patterns", have been around for decades, but in the last ten years technology has made it possible to do things with them that were not possible before. A quick mention of this history might be useful to some, so I hope the reader will bear with me if this is familiar material. Since the early days of electric lighting for stage, television and film, when they wanted to break up a light that was too even, or to create a certain pattern with it they used cutouts made of wood or cardboard. This cutout placed in front of a light was also called a cucalorus (hence the nickname "cookie", and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some connection between that name and shadow puppetry, which could be where Kukla from "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" got his name.)

When the ellipsoidal reflector spotlight was invented, it gave them a chance to make this pattern very bright when shot out of a smaller instrument, but the tradeoff was that it had to withstand great heat that close to the lamp. Thus, the metal template was a logical step. Metal is cheap to produce, if you don't need too fine an image, but it gets to be a limitation for some designs where there is only a little bit of light coming out (overheating and burning up) or where there are lines that are gossamer thin (warping). The other drawback to stainless steel or other types of metal is that it works much like a paint stencil. Have you ever tried to spray paint the letter O through a stencil? If the letter were formed in its ideal state, the middle part would fall out of the stencil, so it has to be tabbed to keep it in one piece. A better analogy might be to call the middle of the letters so affected "islands", and to say that they must be connected to the "mainland" or they get lost. Either way, this is done automatically by either the lighting designer or their manufacturer of choice, when the template is created. Don't worry about how to make it work, just realize in advance, this factor can potentially change the integrity of the logo design. The average viewer will not be holding a copy of your letterhead up next to the wall or floor where they are seeing the logo projected, so most of the time it will never be noticed, but it's there.

When that kind of compromise is not an option, a new kind of technology, brought into common practice in the last 5 years, is ready to take over. Templates can be made from heat resistant glass. The amount of heat involved was impractical before ETC and several other manufacturers reinvented the spotlights that project the patterns we make. Now the standard lighting instruments in a modern rental shop are all capable of projecting glass templates.

Glass allows the islands and bridges to be an irrelevant detail. An opaque mirror-like surface reflects the light back towards the lamp where the design is intended to be dark, and the glass itself, uncoated, forms the medium on which the entire image may rest. No geometrical constraints are placed on the glass images. For an extra charge, they can even be coated in partial degrees, achieving a gray scale image, or use microscopically thin optical coatings that create color instead of opacity. Many layers of this can be applied atop one another, resulting in true color realistic projections that are very true to the original photos or illustrations.

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Jeremy Kumin is Tri-Luminary's founder and CEO. With 18 years professional lighting design experience, he has a body of work which often employes textured lighting and vibrant color. His corporate clients have been the beneficiary of his expert use of projected imagery since 1995.