With all of the glass in modern buildings, it takes more than a mirror sheen to develop a game-changing architectural vision. Frosted glass designs for doors, windows, and glass walls offer multiple opportunities inside and outside of buildings to explore your creative vision while also addressing practical concerns.
Here are four reasons frosted window graphics are perfect for your latest architectural vision:
1. The Comfort of Privacy
Elements of frosted glass can offer privacy to people in your building without the old-fashioned solutions—like closed blinds or drawn curtains—that compromise your aesthetics.
Frosted elements at eye-level, or across portions of glass that overlook seating areas, can be highly effective and less enclosing than fully frosted walls or windows. Bands, strips, and brand-etched boxes can maintain a sleek style while also helping to obscure workspaces just enough to keep employees relaxed and productive.
Harvard Business School has reported that “giving employees more privacy can increase their productivity,” a phenomenon that HBS Professor Ethan Bernstein calls the Transparency Paradox. Bernstein’s study found that performance could improve 10% to 15% with more window privacy in the workplace.
Frosted graphics can build this sense of privacy and exclusivity with soft blurs in your glass architecture at the same time that they establish your vision.
2. Subtle Security
If information security is a significant consideration in your building (as it is in financial, legal, medical, and government organizations), you can use frosted window graphics to protect sensitive environments from prying eyes without overt signals of secrecy.
A frosted glass wall with narrow brand letters or a logo outline etched into it is at once decorative and practical. The negative-space graphic doesn’t show much of what lies beyond but gives your surface an upscale visual interest combined with the open feel of glass. An architect can use these features to control visibility with a “light touch” while protecting private information or conversations from undesired attention.
3. Design Ingenuity
Frosted films let the glass be glass—transmitting light and showing shadows—while also making it into a versatile canvas for themed graphics, prominent branding, signage for glass doors, or images projected in light.
Enhance the ergonomic flow of your balustrades, walkways, atriums, and glass partitions with graphics or textures die-cut from frosted window film that will catch the eye even as they blend gently into the surfaces or environments on the other side.
Dynamic privacy graphics like VisionControlFilm have even more opportunities for creative applications. This versatile film shifts from transparent to frosted at different viewing angles. Logos and graphics will amazingly materialize and fade away as you move past the glass surface. A full wall with VisionControlFilm can provide calibrated privacy from specific angles, or frost only the direction of those squint-inducing afternoon sun rays.
4. Wildlife Protection
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming a larger priority for companies around the globe, with a marked rise in the philanthropic and community initiatives.
We’ve even begun to see a rise in buildings that are designed with birds in mind. 300 million to 1 billion birds are estimated to die each year from building collisions, but a properly designed glass surface can reduce bird collisions by 95%. Include frosted glass graphics in your architectural vision to make it stand out—not only to passersby and guests but also to the wildlife that can be most vulnerable.
Frosted window graphics are a versatile architectural solution. They can contribute to creative touches, human comforts, and safer skies for animals. If your vision is unique enough, perhaps all at once.
