Once upon a time, an ammunition company developed a neat new technology where they put a little glow-in-the-dark blob on the back of a bullet that would glow when the bullet was fired, showing where it went. This was great, because previous tracer ammunition used a little tiny fire to show where it was going. But that little tiny fire can set big fires. And in the military it can give away your position. So this clever company grew big and fast. And it needed a nice sign in the lobby.
Initially they wanted each letter to be filled with dummy bullets, which would look really cool but it also added some additional issues to the project because that meant that every letter would need to be able to hold within it about thirty pounds of ammo. I found a source to make channel letters with a transparent cap, and because we didn’t really need to fill all three inches of depth with bullets, I created a foam cutting device using the nichrome wire from a thrift store hair dryer and carefully cut out the letter shapes from 1” thick foil-backed insulation foam to take up some of that space, but when we did a test mount on the wall they actually preferred the silver and we never filled them with the ammunition.
Now that I think about it, it’s too bad we don’t have fireflies here because it would be fun to fill the letters with them temporarily for like a christmas party or something but we’d have to release them afterwards.
Work samples of Jesse Johnson
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