David Ashton admits he had no idea what he was doing.

The largest sign he ever made to that point was 2 feet by 4 feet, a project for his grandma while Ashton was a high schooler. But, as Janet Marie Smith talked, the graphic designer drew — and those sketches helped create a lasting legacy, a timepiece that is one of the many iconic features at Camden Yards.

Since the ballpark opened in 1992, that clock has kept time through the best and worst of Orioles baseball. But for the moment Ashton was out of his depth. He was going head to head with two of the biggest design firms in America for the opportunity to design the figurehead that would rest atop the scoreboard at Camden Yards for decades, and he was almost paralyzed in indecision.

Those sketches were the answer. Ashton, then the owner of Baltimore’s Ashton Design, copied them onto better paper, colored them, then tucked them into an orange folder he outfitted with an old-school Orioles logo.

Ashton was relieved that Smith, the team’s vice president of planning and development, wasn’t at her desk when he dropped the proposal off. He left it on her desk, wiping his hands of a project he never expected to land.

Until the next day, when Smith walked in the door.

At that time, Ashton Design was a two-person operation. Ashton himself was looking for a new job because a recession had dried up business. But, with Smith and then-Maryland Stadium Authority Executive Director Bruce Hoffman rattling off ideas for the Camden Yards project, Ashton’s life changed.

“Well, I guess we got it,” Ashton said to his secretary.

The decisions to employ first Ashton and then Triangle Sign & Service, another Baltimore company, were key to aspects of Oriole Park’s charm. They understood Baltimore. They understood the vision Smith had for Camden Yards. And together they created a marvel — a clock that has become timeless.

“We tried to touch everything to give it a — I hate to say antique-y look, but that’s what really made it special and made it like baseball always used to be,” said Ashton, who bemoaned the cookie-cutter, multi-use stadiums that became common in the 1970s. “And boy did it change baseball back to the right stuff.”

This month, the Orioles took the clock down so it can undergo a complete refurbishment, which it hasn’t received since it went up more than 30 years ago.

The faces will be changed, the neon lighting on the “Orioles” lettering swapped out for LED, a fresh coat of paint delivered and a new internal mechanism installed. The weather vanes are also receiving touch-ups. They’ll all be back in place for opening day in March.

To get to this point, however, Smith took a leap of faith with two local companies that hadn’t done anything at this scale before. Ashton was the first part of that puzzle. Triangle, under the direction of Bob Kaye, mostly created signs for businesses inside shopping malls. They had never worked on a stadium before Camden Yards.

Together, they helped create the vision for a new era of ballparks — an old-school design with modern amenities.

“There’re several things that are iconic, whether it’s the clock, whether it’s the stainless-steel prismatic letters at the home plate entrance, there are all kinds of things in the concourse,” said Kaye, who retired from Triangle about five years ago. “It was all extremely unique at the time, and it has since been copied repeatedly by every stadium that has been built since then.”

The design sketches Ashton made were handed to Triangle, and from there Triangle went about turning them into a reality. (The company is overseeing the refurbishment of the clock, as well, but a nondisclosure agreement with the Orioles prevented a current representative from speaking about the project.)

Triangle turned Ashton’s one-dimensional drawings into 3D shop drawings, then began crafting the immense structure.

“This thing was big,” Kaye said. “It’s a 14-foot-diameter clock, and the overall length is almost 31 feet, if you include the scrollwork. The letters were 3 feet tall, and we had to build it deep enough … to build ladders into the internal structure, because you have to be able to go in and service this periodically.

“At the time, this was built with fluorescent lamps for lighting. So you had to periodically go in and change the lamps. In case there was a problem with the motor for the clock itself, you had to be able to go in there. So there’s an entire structure built on the inside for servicing capabilities.”

The total weight of that clock is 5,000 pounds. Before building it, Triangle had to figure out how to transport it from its facility through the streets of Baltimore. The clock, then, was split into two pieces.

“You also have to have a structure that’s capable of supporting this,” Kaye said. “There’re three vertical poles [on the scoreboard structure] and then you lower the sign into place, and you’re building within the internal structure of the sign an interior structure that actually marries to the poles, so it’s almost a pole within a pole.”

In that way, the clock has hung above the ballpark for more than three decades. But Ashton envisioned more than just a clock.

Given the brick-and-steel aesthetic of the park, Ashton felt a clock sitting by itself atop a video board might appear “naked” and out of place. The scrollwork on both sides of the clock helped blend it into the surroundings, and the weather vanes on both ends of the scoreboard were another small touch that left a large impression.

“They were literally building an old-fashioned ballpark, even though it wasn’t old-fashioned at all,” Ashton said. “But that’s what they were doing. They were appealing to the true baseball fans, and it really worked. I just went along with that. We designed brackets on each side of the clock to give it a little more human interest rather than it just being a digital clock.”

Like anything, though, the clock and weather vanes are showing their age, which prompted the refurbishment project that coincides with a larger renovation of the scoreboard and video screen.

For instance, the iconic “Domino Sugars” sign that had cast its glow across Baltimore’s nighttime sky since 1951 was replaced in 2021. The goal was to preserve a symbol synonymous with Baltimore itself, just as the Orioles are now doing with the clock.

“Hopefully you’re changing it to make it last for another 40, 50 years,” Kaye said.

At the time Ashton first made his sketches, imagining the long-lasting legacy was impossible. But a decade or so after the Camden Yards project was completed, Ashton stumbled upon his original sketches in a box in his office. He sent them to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where they now reside.

Ashton laughs as he thinks about that bit of fortune, to have his drawings immortalized in two places — one in Cooperstown, another at Camden Yards. But he’s not alone in appreciating the meaning of a project that is seen by hundreds of thousands of fans each summer.

“It’s just one of those once-in-a-lifetime projects you have the opportunity to participate in,” said Frank Machen, the project manager at Triangle, during a television interview in the 1990s.

The project was such a notable part of Machen’s life that, in his 2023 obituary, his family wrote it was his proudest achievement. After all, in the sign business, there are only so many truly unique challenges.

“Normally when you build that set of letters that say GAP, we do hundreds of these and you build them and they’re gone,” Kaye said. The Camden Yards clock, by contrast, “is something that everybody who worked on it, it stays with them because it’s truly something you can look up at and say, ‘I did that.’”