“There are not only signs that can read your mood, but also traditional sign painters,” said Lori Anderson, President and CEO of the International Sign Association (ISA), during a press briefing last Friday morning at the Sign Expo 2018. “Signage”—like graphic communications in general—has come to encompass a bewildering range and variety of media and technologies, and nowhere was this more evident than at the Sign Expo, held in Orlando, Fla., last week. Walking the show floor, you find traditional channel letters, magnetic signage, neon lighting, LED displays, digital displays, and, of course, print in all its various incarnations.

And signage technologies are constantly evolving. For example, an ISA Innovation Award went to Component Signage, Inc. which has developed an interesting new alternative to neon lighting. INCISEON Skeletonized is a 12-volt replacement for traditional glass tube neon lighting which can be custom-cut and formed into any shape based on customer-supplied art, and can be retrofitted into any pre-existing neon application. Someday, we may hear a song in which “the INCISEON lights are bright on Broadway.”

As for “signs that can read your mood”—that was another Innovation Award winner: Cirrus Systems, which was demonstrating SIGHT, a digital analytics system for signage that not only features car counting (marketers, brandowners, and other businesses like to know if their exterior signage is actually being seen by anyone, gauged by counting how many cars pass the sign) but also but also face tracking. It can analyze the faces of individuals looking at the sign and determine if they are male or female, their age (not down to the year, but in terms of “young,” vs. “old,” vs. “middle-aged”), how long they spent looking at the sign or display, and their approximate mood based on their facial expression. (Are they smiling? Frowning? Agape in horror? That kind of thing.) The idea is to glean as much quantitative data as possible on the impact of what are essentially marketing campaigns.