People Cutouts

Cutouts of people in life size can be a lot of fun! We see people cutouts being used in trade shows, for events and sales meetings, and we’ve even made them of the candidates in the New Hampshire Primary.

What we usually need to make a full size cutout is a good digital photo of the person. It helps if they are facing the camera, and we need to think about the structural stability of things like this. You’ll see in the photo that we left some white around their legs to give them strength.

I have an old photo of me sitting next to a cutout of Johnny Carson, taken some years ago at a trade show. You can do the same kind of thing, and it’s great fun!

Instant Backwall

When faced with the expense of buying a trade show booth, you can get creative and save real money. Here’s what one of our customers did- six retractable banner stands to make a backwall for a 20 foot booth. They rented a table and a few chairs, and they had a very nice looking setup.

Even better, they could carry the banner stands into the show hall, instead of paying several hundred dollars to have a booth moved from the loading dock to the booth space. The total cost of the six banner stands was about $2700, which is less than you pay for a typical 10 foot booth.

These are 36″ retractable banner stands, so the six of them are 18 feet wide. We also have 48″ banner stands, which would allow you to get to a full 20 feet by using 5 banner stands.

Three Economy Rectractables

If you are really on a tight budget, we have a 31″ wide economy retractable banner stand for $249. We have strung 3 of them together many times to yield a 93″ wide graphic for a 10 foot booth. We charge $224 each if you buy three economy banner stands, so you can do a pretty snappy show booth for $672. How can you beat that?

Big check at WPI Graduation

My daughter graduation from Worcester Poly Tech this past weekend. I am so proud of her! What I was also proud of was that a big check that we made was used in the graduation ceremony. It represented the senior class gift to WPI.

We do a lot of big checks for presentations, and what makes us special is that we do them fast, affordably, and right!

What WPI did was create a big check with gloss laminate on the face, so that a dry erase marker can be used to write the big check, and it can be erased and re-used. That makes each use of the big check less expensive!

Hooray for WPI! Hooray for the class of 2012! Hooray for the end of tuition checks!

4×8 Sheet Flatbed Printed

More and more, we find ourselves printing to flat sheets of gatorboard, sintra, coroplast and foamcore. It used to be that we printed on paper and then mounted the paper to the board. Not any more.

Our flatbed printers give the same 720 dpi high resolution output to board that we were doing on paper. It’s a single step process, so it’s less expensive and those savings are passed on to you.

The other advantage is that the UV curable inks are tougher and therefore more durable than prints on paper. We find that we often do not need to laminate over gatorboard when it’s UV printed, which is another savings. These prints are great for trade shows, museum displays, and for photo enlargement for display in your office.

Especially for large pieces like the one pictured, it’s easier to print on the board itself instead of trying to line up a huge piece of paper and get it all on straight. We love our new flatbed printers, and are finding more great ways to use them every day!

Theater Banner

When you need a vinyl banner in a hurry, call us! Our customer needed us to ship their theater backdrop banner today. They sent us the file late last night. It will be done!

Our digital banner printing process allows us to react very quickly to your needs. It seems that in today’s world, everything gets done at the last minute. That’s our specialty – doing it fast, beautifully, and right. No wonder we are Fedex’s largest customer in the North Country of NH!

When you need your vinyl banner in a rush, think of us!

Banner on Brick Wall

I tell people all the time- “Printing your vinyl banner is easy. Figuring out how to put it up is the tough part.” It’s so true.

One of the tough questions is how to put a banner on a brick wall, and I wanted to show this idea for how to do that. What the customer did was to put metal rings in lead anchors in the mortar between large pieces of stone, and then put bungee cords that hold the banner taut between the metal rings.

Since the metal rings are a ways apart, this setup can accept vinyl banners of different sizes. If a liquor vendor gives him a different size banner, it still can be displayed here.

Bungee cords are great in this application. If the customer had used rope, it eventually would have stretched and slackened, and the banner would droop. This does a really nice job of keeping it looking good.

We’re big fans of bungee cords, they also allow a vinyl banner to lift out of the way to shed the wind. Not such a big deal here, but important when the vinyl banner is across the street!

Topo Map File

Want to put up custom wallpaper that your hiker friends adore? How about a topo map of your favorite hiking area? Or, perhaps, the area you live in, or have a vacation house near? This can be done, and beautifully.

The USGS publishes digital files of their topo maps that you can download for free. They are pretty nice, hi-rez files, and we can take them up to pretty good size. We can also put a few of them together for you if need be.

So, if you are looking for something unusual to put on that wall, think about a piece of topo map wallpaper!

Wallboard Vinyl Collage

Our new flatbed printer gives us the ability to react to rush jobs. Not only does it give us another machine, but it’s twice as fast as our original machine.

When this customer came to us on Tuesday asking if we could have wallpaper to them for Friday, we said sure. Of course, then we didn’t get the files until noon on Thursday. But it was still not a problem!

We printed an 8 x 16 set of wallboard vinyl, and had it in a box by 3:30. Which I’ll tell you is closer than I like to cut it, but we got it done! Our customer needs to have the wallpaper  installed over the weekend for a product launch on Monday. They’ll have the wallpaper on time, the rest is up to them!

This is how we like to do business. No waiting around. No long lead times. Send us the files and keep your eyes peeled for Fedex!

Pre-Printed Chalkboard

It seems that every day we see a new application for flat bed printing. This one was a chalk board with branding around. The beer company gives it to the restaurant as a sidewalk sandwich sign with a place to write in the daily specials. What a great idea!

Printed with a UV curable flat bed printer, the branding on the sandwich sign will last for years. It’s waterproof, and will not fade in sunlight. The printing is very durable, and won’t rub off when the sign is erased and rewritten many times.

One of the best things about flatbed printing is that it can be done on almost any surface. We print on typical signmaking materials like coroplast and sintra, but it can be done on almost anything the ink will adhere to. We’ve printed on ceiling tiles, acoustic panels, plexiglass and a number of other materials with excellent results. We’ve even printed great looking graphics on a white painted board.

Only your imagination limits you with applications for flatbed printing!

Our Tee Signs

Spring is in the air, and that means the start of the golf tournament season. One of the things we do for golf tournaments is make the production of golf sponsor signs a breeze. Send us the list of your tournament sponsors, and you’ll get back a box of sponsor signs ready to jab into the ground. Many people have told us that theses are the nicest golf sponsor signs they’ve ever seen.

We print them on coroplast, which is plastic cardboard. They are waterproof, and durable. They come with a U shaped wire stake taped to the back, and they jab into the ground. Because they are small (10×17″), you can put them so they face the golfers as they tee off, instead of putting them at the side or back of the tee box. This actually gives the sponsors more exposure. After all, who looks backward when you are getting ready to tee off?

What people like about them is that they are light and easy to deal with, you hop into a golf cart with the box of signs and away you go. Signs are up in no time.

At the end of the tournament, you collect them and put them in a box for next year. You’ll only need to print signs for your new sponsors.