Stores Signs for Retailers

Posted on February 24, 2012 by
Store Signs printed flatbed

Flatbed Printed Store Signs

Every store has needs for retail store signage that lets the customer know where to go. If you are Home Depot, all that is done by headquarters store design. If you run a small store, you get to do it for yourself!

The picture shows signs we did for Rand’s Hardware in Plymouth NH. They needed store signs to let their customers know how their plumbing department was organized, and we printed them several two-sided store signs on styrene that do the job very nicely. They are durable and attractive, and they help people find what they need in the store more easily.

When you don’t have someone designing and printing your store signs for you, give us a call! We can do the typesetting and layout as well as the printing, giving you a store sign that’s ready to go. Best of all, it only takes a few days!

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Historical Photo Enlargement

Posted on February 14, 2012 by
Historical Photo Enlargement

Historical Photo in a Bank

We really enjoy doing enlargements of historical photos. First of all, it’s fun to see how things looked all those years ago. People also find them to be interesting, and they’ll take the time to really examine them. This photo enlargement is from the collection of our local historical society, and hangs in the offices of MVSB, one of our local banks.

You’ll often see people looking at an historical photo like this, trying to see if their house had been built when the picture was taken, or talking about buildings that are no longer there.

Our new HP z6100 printers have three shades of black, and give us exceptional color depth when printing black and white photos, especially on glossy paper. Give it a try- you’ll be impressed!

We can either take your historical photo and scan it, or you can scan it locally and send us the digital file. Honestly, we would rather you send us the file, since very old photos can be pretty fragile. If you are sending the photo, be sure to put it between sheets of cardboard to protect it.

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Banner Stand for a Traveling Event

Posted on February 9, 2012 by
event banner stand

Visiting Chef Banner Stand

Ever since they came on the market, we’ve thought that there’s nothing better than a retractable banner stand to travel around with a visiting expert. Here’s one we just did for a celebrity chef doing a tour of college cafeterias. In about ten seconds she can have signage that tells everybody what is going on and who is doing it.

 

The other great thing about the banner stand is that you can put it wherever it needs to go, move it around as needed, and never have to worry about how you are going to fixture it. It’s completely self contained. When the event is over, you let it retract into it’s canister, and put the whole thing into a handy nylon carrying case. Put it over your shoulder and off you go to the next place.

We like the idea for a visiting chef, and it works great for author book signings and visiting speakers just as well. We also see them used extensively at trade shows, in retail, and in public areas like airports and train stations. Whenever you have a need for portable signage, give a retractable banner stand some consideration!

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Photo Wallpaper – from your digital photo!

Posted on February 2, 2012 by
photo wallpaper

Athletic Photos on Wallpaper

You would be amazed what we can do with a fairly ordinary digital photo. The photo wallpaper at the right was made from two separate 5 megapixel digital photos. The final photo wallpaper is 11-1/2 feet tall- notice the doorway at the right! They are stunning, and give this college’s new athletic center an exciting look.

It turns out that we can resample your photos up so that the pixels are small enough that you won’t notice them. There are some tricks in Photoshop that allow us to do this without causing problems with the photo.

Also, understand that you aren’t going to go right up to the photo and expect it to be as clear as one in a magazine. These photo murals are to be viewed from several feet away, and we don’t try to make them razor sharp up close. Nor could we! But they are spectacular, and we get wallpaper from digital photographs that will knock your socks off.

If you want to put a photo of your town, your last vacation, your kids, or whatever on a wall in your home or business, it’s easily done. Give us a call when you want to turn your digital photo into wallpaper.

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Museum Displays on Sticky Back Vinyl

Posted on January 31, 2012 by
historical photos for museum displays
Wallboard Vinyl for a Museum

One thing about museum displays. They change. So it becomes important to have the large format graphics done on a material that can be easily changed out. We suggest our Wallboard Vinyl for this kind of thing. It’s an adhesive backed vinyl with a special “sticky note” glue on the back that adheres nicely to surfaces like painted drywall.

When the exhibit is over, you can pull it down as easily as pulling a sticky note off the wall, and put up the next set of displays. We have several museums that are finding this to be a great way of doing temporary museum displays.
You can also put these museum display back up somewhere else if you like, the adhesive will work many times as long as you don’t get it dirty. Which also means that you can move things around easily on your museum display if you decide a change is needed.
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Wallpaper of Nautical Charts

Posted on January 23, 2012 by
Wallpaper from Nautical Chart
Nautical Chart Wallpaper

We’ve done this a few times, and the results are spectacular! The Feds have all the nautical charts around the coast of the US available for free download at the NOAA website. The photo you see is an 8×20 foot nautical chart wallpaper from New York all the way past the Georges Banks. It’s on its way to a seaside home in Rhode Island where it will certainly be a topic of much conversation!

The only difficult thing is that the government, in their wisdom, has everything in BSB file format (whatever that is). There are links on the NOAA site that send you to places where you can download a utility to convert them to jpg or png, we used BSB Reader and it works great. The charts are really high resolution, so they have the pixel density to go up to wallpaper size pretty nicely.
If you don’t wnt to go to the hassle of converting the files, let us know where you want your charts and we’ll send you a jpg of what they look like. All part of the service!
What a great way to put up wallpaper that becomes a topic of conversation! We did a chart of Nantucket Sound for a vacation house there a few months back, and they loved it. Maybe this is the next big thing for Custom Printed Wallpaper!
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Printing Special Shapes of Plastic

Posted on January 18, 2012 by
Flatbed printing on special shapes
Printing a Special Shape

Rectangles are easy. Circles a little harder. Something like this- well, there’s a trick to printing special shapes. Naturally, the customer wanted it to be two sided as well, which made it trickier still.

The material we used was 1/4″ Komatex (Sintra), which we bought as the fluted shape from a supplier who can computer cut special shapes from sheets of material. One of these days we’ll be able to afford that machine, but for now it works pretty well for us to outsource.
Our challenge was then to figure out how to align the blanks to print properly, and Ken in our vinyl department figured it out. We used our UV flatbed printer and got a great result!
Of course, we bought a few extra pieces just in case we messed up. Everything ran perfectly, and we have a few of the special shaped blanks remaining. So, if you have a need for a few great looking medallions, give us a call. We can print them right away.
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