What Makes or Breaks Your Lighting Design?

When you’re planning a display, where does lighting come into play? As an essential part of your overall design, it’s important that this aspect of your display receive strong attention. But what is good or bad lighting design? Here’s a quick look at a few things to consider when you’re planning your exhibit.

6 Ways Lighting Can Make or Break Your Design?

• Good lighting highlights, bad lighting blinds. Does your lighting show off your exhibit design or does it stand out like a sore thumb? You want to avoid lighting that sends waste light everywhere, causes glare or is too bright for the area you’re trying to light up. Consider the right lighting for your design or vision. The same lighting used on your neighbors display may not be right for your design.
• Keep your cool. Some lighting types can get very hot, such as halogens. However, when it comes to art, artifacts and customers, keeping cool is a better bet in almost every situation. If your lighting is too hot for comfort, consider switching to a cooler lighting option such as energy-efficient LED lighting.
• Is your lighting even or do you have puddles of shadow? If you’re having a hard time illuminating the entire area, it may be that you need to go with a wider flood to spread the light out, or add more lighting to make up the difference. Your customers shouldn’t have to fight to see what you’re trying to show them because of bad lighting design.
• Do you need to mix your lighting types? If you’re trying to show off things like makeup or jewelry, having all of your lighting coming from above isn’t necessarily going to shed the best light on the matter at hand. Consider adding ambient lighting, side lighting or similar approaches to gain a better degree of refraction on the objects you’re trying to show off or sell.
• Is it just too dark? Unless you’re going for a dungeon look, add lights, lighten up walls or adding softly reflective surfaces to help lighten your display. Add some light touches, such as string lights, backlit displays, under shelf lighting and similar effects to bring up the light level of your display as a whole.
• Will color work? Though it can be tempting to light everything up in your company logo’s particular shade of blue, you may want to exercise some level of restraint. Keep colored lights in areas where they’ll really pop, such as cutouts, uplights and downlights, but stick with neutral tones for your exhibit’s interior.

By keeping these tips in mind when you’re considering lighting design in your display, you’ll be able to avoid the worst pitfalls of bad lighting design while enhancing your overall exhibit in the best possible ways. Not certain what elements you should go with in your display? The experienced professionals at Light Craft Manufacturing are ready to help. Reach out today for more information or to get a quote on our high-efficiency, high-quality lighting systems.