Spruce Men – Vintage Barbershop Style Signage

Spruce – a brand new barber/clothier concept opened recently in the Denver area. I had the pleasure of working with the team there to create something very unique before their big grand opening.

Spruce caters to men’s grooming and fashion by offering classic barber shop services with a high tech twist. Not only can you book services with their custom mobile app or on their website, that booking shows up in real time on this board inside the salon. Updates happen so that both staff and customers know how long they’ll need to wait for a particular service. These readouts are incorporated right into the sign.

I designed this board from scratch for Spruce, first working the designs out on black paper, then moving to the computer to get the exact fit. We came up with the idea of the services being represented by icons both to save space as well as tie back to Spruce’s tech roots. The menu bar along the bottom calls to mind the menu bar of an operating system. But when it came to producing the board, it was back to traditional sign-painting techniques as opposed to chalk, for extra durability. Microcontrollers embedded behind the board control both the blue readouts as well as the light up logo on top that can be any color of the rainbow.

The Spruce menu fuses a vintage look with high-tech features into something one of a kind, and VERY unique.