Commercial Outdoor Lighting Design

Commercial outdoor lighting provides a business with much more than general lighting. Just like a masterpiece oil painting requires many brushstrokes, many colors, and sometimes multiple layers of oil, so too does a commercial outdoor lighting system require much more than a single layer of generic, bright white light. To be truly effective for your client, outdoor lighting must be multifunctional in purpose and multidimensional in form. Practical considerations such as human safety, facility security, and energy conservation must be carefully calculated in advance in order to know which commercial outdoor light fixtures will prove the most viable in any particular system. Aesthetics must be based on enhancing on both conscious and unconscious factors to generate true sensibility and a presentable face to the world. Sometimes this involves paying close attention to intangibles that your competitors may be overlooking that will make your proposal in the end more robust, more readily apparent as a superior solution, and more targeted toward client expectation and available budget. Thinking first about the industry type and geographic location of your client will help you more efficiently identify and prioritized all necessary elements or any commercial outdoor lighting system you develop, design, and install.

The first thing you must do is get to know how your client operates in terms of actions and results. Getting a clear picture of this in turn tells you what lights to shine on the picture. Businesses either produce a product or perform a service. Some provide a combination of both. Any commercial light fixtures you install should provide a visual compliment to the nature of the business itself. This is much more concrete and tangible than you may sound on the surface. Factories and warehouses tend to want a great deal of lighting for security because burglaries and vandalism are a threat to products housed within the facility. They are much more concerned with these priorities than they are decorative or ornamental trappings. The more practical and functional the commercial outdoor lighting fixtures appear, the more the business establishes itself as a place of action and outcome rather than presence through image. You should, however, not completely abandon aesthetics for such clients. A neat, clean, and well-proportioned outdoor lighting system communicates an impression that the business it showcases is equally efficient and organized. Keep it simple and Spartan.

Service oriented businesses, however, need a great deal more attention paid to aesthetics. This is because many services, such as change management and business development, often represent specialized business to business services that are based on highly abstract concepts and specialty niche markets. To communicate their value, they often use archetypal imagery that the unconscious mind intuitively associates with a “meaning” that is not easy to put into words, but nonetheless understandable on a basic emotional level. Almost all advertising on television, for example, uses symbolism in this fashion. When working for a client who operates on this level of business, you can complement any associative symbolism they use by decorative commercial outdoor lights and new lamping technologies such as LED that are both revolutionary, energy efficient, and applicable to a wide range of decorative applications..

Of course, making money and saving the client money requires some very skillful planning and careful calculation of a number of variables that have to be factored into the equation. You must use commercial outdoor lights that will use less electricity than the ones being used. This is a given for any client, and something of a nonnegotiable for several reasons. Lowering power costs helps buffer operations against recession. Reducing overhead helps recover what may be something of a high price point on certain fixtures, or a high labor rate for a large facility that requires a substantial amount of time for installation. Community dark sky laws must be accommodated. Glare and light pollution HAVE to be eliminated even when the client specifically demands the brightest possible lights for their facility. Bright is not a problem. Light spillage is, so superior optics and reflectors will probably be needed to provide optimal directional control for such things as parking lot lights and flood lights. Environmental regulations also play a heavy role in determining what commercial outdoor lighting fixtures you can sell your clients. In states like Arizona, mercury vapor lights can no longer be installed anywhere due to the toxic nature of mercury. Incandescent lights must be replaced no later than 2010 in California. Resultantly, you will need to carefully choose from newer, more advanced HID lighting fixture designs, induction lights, commercial fluorescent lights, or state of the art LED lights that are getting better, bigger, and brighter every day.

RLLD Commercial Lighting can help you accomplish all of this with several unique advantages we routinely pass on to contractors. As a Design Services/Domestic Lighting Equipment vendor, we can provide with specification grade, warranted fixtures made only in the USA. With some of the most advanced lighting design software, we can work with you to develop a detailed schematic layout of the commercial outdoor lighting system you can then take straight to your client’s table. This saves enormous time on manually computed mathematics, and it allows small companies without a budget for development software to expand their design capabilities by relying on ours. Finally, we provide rapid lead time on most outdoor commercial lighting fixtures and arrange for expeditious drop shipping directly to your client’s site.

We charge nothing on top of equipment costs and mandatory sales taxes, so all of these services are complimentary to any client who purchases equipment from us.