What is Architectural Lighting?

It’s one of a brand’s most powerful first impressions, evoking a range of desired emotions within visitors.

Whether it’s the colorful, on-brand lighting on your retail store’s exterior or the welcoming ambiance of your restaurant's interior glow, your lighting makes a powerful first impression with customers.

Why? Because we, as humans, are neurologically wired to associate certain colors, patterns, and levels of brightness with specific emotions.

Highly-skilled lighting architects -- which we at Lektron are privileged to work with regularly from brands across North America -- understand this deep-seated autonomic response and use their skills to create strong experiences that capture both visual and emotional attention.

By harnessing this attention, businesses like yours immediately start off on the right foot with customers and create a positive emotional experience that simultaneously amplifies your branding while planting the seeds for return visits.

It functionally, yet stylishly, creates effective and healthy illumination.

This might seem so obvious as to not warrant mentioning, but architectural lighting's role in lighting a space goes beyond simply providing illumination.

The best lighting architects and designers recognize that quality lighting is a necessity for the health and safety of customers and staff alike.

In fact, in one of the largest neurological studies of its kind, biomedical researchers found a clear link between good lighting quality and specific outcomes:

• Reduced stress levels

• Improved reaction times

• Higher sleep quality

• Increased cognitive performance

For businesses, quality architectural lighting -- that’s made all the more cost effective and impactful through sustainable technologies like LED lighting -- is directly tied to helping reduce accidents, improving workplace performance, and increasing safety for customers and staff alike.

It accentuates a building’s highlight features and accentuates its design.

Architectural lighting, beyond just providing healthy illumination and creating a strong emotional touchpoint for your customers, acts as an agent of visual guidance.

Much in the way it creates emotional connections with your customers through color and vibrance, your lighting guides your customers’ eyes to key features of your indoor and outdoor spaces, creating a visual journey that works hand in hand with the physical design of your space, cementing an emotional experience that they remember.

By working together, your architecture and your lighting become an emotional experience that unites the senses, reinforces your brand’s presence and value, and creates strong memories that keep you top-of-mind in your target consumer audiences.

Flexible LEDs allow lighting designers to create complex lighting designs with less hassle.

Just about every lighting designer could tell you about the time they had the perfect design for a client -- within scope, beautiful visuals, and on-brand -- and it was ultimately scrapped.

Why?

Because while nearly everything was perfect fit, the time and hassle, both in the upfront installation and long-term maintenance, would have grown to be more trouble than it was worth for either their team or their client.

However, as the technological landscape of LEDs has improved and grown more and more cost effective, and as industry-leaders like Lektron have developed new flexible LED technologies like LumiFlex®, complex designs are more easily achievable.

LEDs give lighting designers more control over the emotional experiences they create.

No matter the dimensions or purpose of the building, skilled lighting designers aim to make an emotional impact with their work; however, certain architectural constraints can ultimately limit their final designs.

Now, with flexible LED solutions like LumiLine®, even the most intricate and complex designs are possible, allowing lighting architects to create visual experiences that capture the attention of new and returning customers alike.

Moreover, modern LED solutions are technologically equipped to allow granular control over every element of the lighting experience via their:

• Programmability

  Modern LED lighting solutions, like our VibraLine® LED solution, are programmable, allowing for fully customized and dynamic lighting displays that can create the ambiance and tone designers envision for any space.

• Wide range of vibrant colors and vivid brightness

  Whether rigid or flexible, LEDs come in a wide array of vibrant colors and stunning brightness that capture attention and generate excitement from a distance, or set an understated and inviting mood.

• Rugged durability and weather resistance

  LED lighting solutions like our Laser® rigid border tube lighting allow lighting designers to focus more on their craft rather than the limitation of the product, such as whether or not its color or look will last for years to come.

  Impact-resistant and able to stand up to the toughest UV, rain, ice, and other harsh weather conditions, architects and business owners alike can rest assured that the lighting they’re relying on to attract customers can withstand the test of time and the elements.

LEDs allow architectural lighting designers to keep costs down throughout the project’s lifetime.

With both immediate budgetary concerns and long-term costs being a factor in every major lighting project, designers and architects are tasked with keeping cost projections within tight constraints.

Naturally, for many projects, these constraints mean having to sacrifice the ideal design for cheaper, yet less effective lighting products.

However, for the projects that are able to leverage the long-term cost efficiency of modern LED solutions, the budgetary hurdles are largely overcome from the get-go, allowing designers to focus more on their craft and bringing their client’s ideal vision to life.

Businesses achieve unified branding across all of their customer touchpoints.

By leveraging the innate ability of LEDs to create eye-catching visual experiences, brands can amplify their branding through the color and design of their outdoor and indoor lighting.

Through this unified lighting design, businesses cement the emotional impact that they strive to create throughout all of their marketing efforts -- creating a great first impression from the get-go, starting when customers see their building’s stunning colors and brightness.

Businesses enjoy a positive ROI on their architectural LED lighting design investments.

LED lighting and working with professional lighting designers can be a significant investment of time and marketing dollars.

But with the innate time and cost savings of our LED solutions, it’s not a matter of if your investment will pay off, but simply how quickly.

Being UV-resistant, impact-resistant, and able to hold up under some of the most punishing wet weather conditions, our LED lighting eliminates the maintenance costs associated with most other types of architectural lighting.

Moreover, the energy efficiency of LEDs translates to a near-immediate reduction in fixed energy costs, directly feeding into your ROI month after month in energy savings.

Businesses generate higher sales and save more money.

Between the ruggedness of modern LED lighting reducing maintenance costs, the immediate and long-term energy savings, and even the special tax incentives some cities offer to businesses, it’s no wonder why more brands and their designers are favoring architectural LED lighting.

But beyond the savings and ROI, the real benefit comes from being able to create the visual and emotional experiences that grab customer attention, entices them to visit, and generates more one-time and repeat business.