Hennepin Technical College
Overview
When Hennepin Technical College renamed a building the Public Safety & Police Science Center, its Brooklyn Park campus needed its whole exterior wayfinding family to catch up — and the college didn't hand that to a general contractor. It contracted Dimension Sign directly, under a signed agreement with the Minnesota State board, to carry the entire program: ten new post-and-panel directional signs standardizing a decade of piecemeal signs into one clean family, and two campus monuments refurbished in place. Design, fabrication, paint, utility locates, footings, and field install — one contract, from drawing to dirt.
01 / The challenge
The campus's directional signs had accumulated over ten to fifteen years of growth — a mismatched mix of sizes and post types added a sign at a time. The college wanted one consistent, modern family, sized and finished to sit alongside the existing brand: the orange 'H' monument at the Brooklyn Boulevard entry and a rust-toned building monument. Because the new signs had different footprints than the ones they replaced, most old holes couldn't be reused, which meant fresh utility locates and roughly twenty new augered footings across a live, occupied campus — all staged around operations, security, and grounds staff through a single summer window.
02 / Our approach
We cut, welded, painted, and finished every panel and post in our own shop — aluminum channel-body panels on square-tube posts, a consistent black family with orange and rust accents matched to the campus brand, faced in retroreflective white vinyl so they read at night. Then we self-delivered the install: we pulled the Gopher State One Call locates, marked each position, augered holes three to four feet deep for frost stability, and set every post leg in concrete, grading the spoil back into the campus lawn. The two monuments were refurbished rather than torn out — the brick entry monument got a new painted-aluminum face and cover panels, and the former law-enforcement monument was reskinned and given fresh 10-inch painted-aluminum dimensional letters naming the Public Safety & Police Science Center, toned to match the building. Ten signs and two monuments went up over two days in August — and within months the college was back with another exterior sign.
One contract, from drawing to dirt.
Most campus signage arrives through a general contractor, with the sign shop three phone calls removed from the college. Here the college skipped all of that and gave us the whole exterior program directly — so the same shop that drew and fabricated the signs also pulled the locates, augered the footings, and set them in concrete. Owner-direct, self-delivered, single-source: the college had exactly one number to call at every phase, and it called that number again a few months later.
- Design, fabrication, paint, locates, footings, and install under one contract
- Nothing handed off to a GC or a middleman
- Monuments reskinned in place — stewardship over teardown
- The repeat order is the review: the college came back
Across the campus
Scope & features
- Single owner-direct contract with the college (Minnesota State) — no general contractor
- Ten post-and-panel directional signs standardized into one clean black family
- Two campus monuments refurbished in place — reusing the existing masonry
- 10-inch painted-aluminum dimensional letters on the rebranded building monument
- Retroreflective white vinyl copy for night legibility
- Roughly twenty augered concrete footings, three to four feet deep for frost
- Gopher State One Call utility locates pulled before any digging
- Self-delivered end to end: design, in-house fabrication, paint, and field install
- Campus-brand color program — black base, Pantone 158C orange, rust monument tone
- Installed live around campus operations, security, and grounds staff
- The college returned within months for a follow-on exterior sign
Materials
- 1/8" painted aluminum panel faces
- 1.5" aluminum channel-body construction
- 2"×2" aluminum square-tube posts
- Retroreflective white vinyl
- Pantone 158C orange · rust monument tone
- 1/4" painted aluminum dimensional letters
