Super-Clever LED Fins Make Store’s Media Facade On Narrow High Street Visible To People Approaching On Foot

October 3, 2024 by Dave Haynes

This is a fantastically well-conceived, engineered and executed digital media facade on the front of a perfume company’s flagship store and HQ in Andorra. A set of vertical LED fins enable views from people walking toward the building, even though the pedestrian-only high street is very narrow.

Barcelona-based creative technology studio Instronic did the job for Perfumerías Julia – coming up with and delivering a plan for a facade that fits on the street and reflects the brand’s character and personality.

“As Julia’s most iconic location, the design needed to be unique, singular, and memorable,” says Instronic in a detailed online case study. “Additionally, the building’s position posed a visibility issue due to the limited frontal view, so we had to create new vantage points to address this. Moreover, being a commercial store, it was essential that the facade stand out from its surroundings and attract customers.”

A lot of brands that want to use big digital display on their signature locations can just work in some sort of LED structure – conventional, mesh or on glass. But that only really works if there are long and open sightlines to the building, and in this case, the street is more like a lane and the Perfumerías Julia building faces another building, maybe 30 feet away across the concourse.

If a conventional LED display was on the face of that building, pedestrians quite possibly wouldn’t even notice it, but whoever had the building across the lane would DEFINITELY notice it, and would probably be thinking about relocating after a few weeks with a big old wall of bright lights flooding the windows.

So Instronic studied foot traffic patterns along the high street and came up with a plan that made the media visible to pedestrians as they walked towards the building, with the LED fins making carefully-conceived creative visible from a severely off-angle. The fins only face in one direction, based on studies that indicated most people came from one direction

To address the challenge of integrating the new facade with the existing building while preserving light and transparency, we designed a lightweight, segmented metallic structure that creates a second skin. This double skin conceals the original facade, providing uniformity and allowing natural light into the upper floors. The structure, composed of asymmetrical metallic fins, is suspended from the pre-existing structure.

The concept draws inspiration from a bamboo forest, with each fin integrating LED screens on the sides facing down the street and LED lighting on the sides facing up. This dual lighting system enhances visibility and creates a dynamic interplay of light and shadow, delivering a compelling visual narrative that changes based on the viewer’s perspective. 

The facade “corresponds to the primary flow of pedestrian traffic moving uphill. From this angle, the facade is visible from a significant distance, drawing attention as people approach. The design plays with the viewer’s perspective, with content becoming clearer and more intelligible as they move closer, creating a dynamic and evolving experience that captures attention from afar.”

The creative is anamorphic (illusions) to deal with the very different viewing angles:

“One of the key challenges of this project was developing anamorphic content for the downward-facing facade. Due to the angle of view from which pedestrians approach, we had to carefully design the canvas to account for the distortion and ensure the visuals were legible from a distance and gradually revealed as viewers moved closer. The complexity of the canvas design required precise adjustments to maintain the visual integrity, creating an engaging and evolving experience as the viewer’s perspective changes.”

Andorra, if you are geographically-impaired, is a teeny country (a principality) in the Pyrenees, straddling the Spanish-French border.

VERY impressive, award-worthy project!