Balance the Budget Ammendment

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Jay Buckley

I was always taught that the Federal Government needs the ability to deficit spend in bad times in order to stimulate the economy when it needs it. I agreee with that.

Here the rub- we find it too easy to deficit spend even in good times. People always want more than they have the money to buy. Then the bad times hit and it gets way out of control. So, after much thought, I’ve become an advocate of a Constitutional ammendment that requires a balanced federal budget.

My thinking is that it can’t do more damage than continual deficit spending.

People will ask- what happens when something serious comes along, like a world war. Two things are possible- either we don’t get into the war because we cant afford to, or we allow an exception for a declared war. I can live with either.

It would be very painful for America, and especially for Washington, to consider such an ammendment. But to me, it seems like the only way we get control of what’s happening in the finances of this great nation. I wonder if Congress has the guts.

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Banner Stands that Impress

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Jay Buckley
Trade Show Banner Stands
Snazzy Art on a Banner Stand

Every now and then I see something coming off one of our printers that knocks me out! Yesterday it was the art on these banner stands. Our customer is a company that makes horse related products, and they had a piece of art that was a horse made of flames. Wow. I couldn’t imagine where to start to create something like that. It was truly striking!

I always tell people that your trade show graphics need something colorful to attract the eye, and six words or less that will interest your target customer. These banner stands do both, and I bet they’ll be very effective at the trade show our customer is going to.
We print our banner stands using a heavy 11 mil film that has a light blocking layer. It allows us to do something like these banner stands with a rich black background that looks truly rich. We find that the film stays flat for years, while the vinyl that others use will curl at the edges, a problem we call “canoeing.” Our banner stands look great and they last!
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Printing QR Codes

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Jay Buckley
Printing QR codes on store signage
QR Codes on a Store Poster

It’s a good thing we checked! Our customer asked us to print a number of these posters for retail stores, and Ken in our shop grabbed his smart phone to be sure it would read the QR code. It didn’t! It turns our that QR codes need to be of a certain size, depending on the length of the URL they are pointing to. Who knew?

Here’s a web site that talks about the size of QR codes when they are printed.
http://www.qrstuff.com/blog/2011/01/18/what-size-should-a-qr-code-be
Whats going on is that as the web address gets longer, the QR code needs to store more information. A short web address will only need a QR code with 25×25 boxes, but a long web address can get up to 57×57 or even more.
Your smart phone needs to see each dot at about .4mm to be able to read it.  That means a short web addres (a 25×25) will be about 1 cm (3/8″) across on your phone. If you have a 57×57 QR code, it will need to be nearly an inch across.
For poster printing, figure the typical reading distance to be 10 times the width of the QR code. For instance, 2″ across if people will read it from a distance of 20″, which would be typical for a retail application. The code also needs to be clear enough at print size that each pixel of the code is readable. We increased the size of the QR code, and it worked fine on our customer’s poster.
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Vinyl Banners on a Sandwich Sign

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Jay Buckley
vinyl used on a sandwich sign
Sandwich Sign on the Common

In our little town in central NH, we have a town common. One of the best ways to let everybody know what’s happening in town is to put up something on the sandwich signs that the town lets you use. We do this with a vinyl banner, which people simply staple to the wooden sign. In this case, they are advertising the upcoming production of our award winning high school drama department.

The typical sandwich sign that you put out in front of a store is really too small for this application. We make these vinyl banners 30×36″ in size. Any smaller and they would be hard to read as you drive by. If the sign was any larger, it would block views of the cars coming around the common.
This type of sandwich sign works great at almost any high traffic location where people are going slow!
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Very large wallpaper murals

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Jay Buckley
Very large wallpaper printing
Wallpaper for a restaurant ceiling

Here’s a photo of about a quarter of a very large wallpaper mural we just finished. It was 30 x 80 feet in size, and even in a shop as large as ours, we could only get a fourth of it laid out at one time. It was quite a project!

We produced it in 20 strips 4 feet wide and about 30 feet high. Then we put the strips side by side to be sure everything matched up correctly. Thank goodness they did!
As you can see from the picture, this wallpaper mural has brilliant colors. It’s actually going on the ceiling of a restaurant in Cincinatti, and it will be in the shape of a guitar. A fun project to be sure.
Best of all, we produced it in three working days in the shop to meet a tough construction deadline.
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Changing Dates on Vinyl Banners

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Jay Buckley
Changing the date on a vinyl banner
Banner with a date patch

OK, so the Plymouth Rotary prints a vinyl banner that will last for years, but the date changes every time they use it. This happens a lot with vinyl banners used to announce annual events, and we print a lot of vinyl banners like this.

Our solution is to make a patch for the vinyl banner to cover the old date with the new date. This works great, and saves a lot of money. The patches won’t last forever, but they are fine for a couple of weeks, which is generally all that is needed.
If you plan ahead, you can save some money by having all the dates for the next several years printed along with your banner, which is what the Rotary did. They have their Penny Sale in early November every year, so we printed the replacement numbers 1-9 at the same time as the banner, and gave them some double sided tape to apply them with.
This makes it easy to be sure the patches are in the same type face and color as the original. You really need to look at this vinyl banner to see the patch- and that’s how it’s supposed to be!
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Training Flipcharts from PowerPoint

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Jay Buckley
flipcharts for training
Digital Prints as Flipcharts

PowerPoint is a great program to use when you are doing training presentations. I use it myself. It has a few problems, though, that we can solve with training flipcharts printed in our shop and laminated with plastic.

First of all, one session after the other with the lights out can get a little tedious. Mix it up! Turn the lights on and do a section of your training with a large format flipchart presentation. Everyone will perk up.
While the technology has gotten much more reliable over time, you still need to have a laptop, a projector, and all the paraphernalia that goes with them working right. Presentation flipcharts always work! They don’t need power either.
Finally, it’s sometimes easier to interract with a flipchart. You can write on them with a dry erase marker, walk right up to them and point, etc.
A few suggestions-
Flipcharts are best for presentation material that doesn’t change a lot.  It is cheaper to change electronic versions!
Prices get lower the more you buy, so do 25 or more at a time if you can.
You can buy the flipchart holders at any office supply chain store.
Happy flipping!
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Poster Printing of a Double Rainbow Photo

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Jay Buckley
poster printing in New Hampshire
Double Rainbow over Lake Waukewan

I took this photo riding on the foliage train a week ago as we passed from rain to sun along Lake Waukewan. It’s the first double rainbow any of us had ever seen, and it’s the kind of photo that we often enlarge to poster size. In fact, I’m going to blow this photo up to poster size to hang in my office!

You’d be surprised at the great results we can get from a fairly ordinary 3-4 megapixel camera photo. Generally, we want to see 72-100 dpi in the printed size, so a 6 megapixel photo from my Android phone at 1840 x 3264 pixels can do a pretty nice 24 x 42 photo enlargement, and we can usually resample a smaller digital image to give us enough pixels that they are not noticable on the poster we print.
In fact, my older 2 megapixel camera takes a 1200 x 1600 image that I’ve printed a lot of posters with, and they look terrific! You can always send us your file and we’ll let you know if we have any trouble taking it up to the size you want.
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UV Inks to Keep Prints from Fading

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Jay Buckley
prevention of fading of large format prints
Window Exposed Prints

From time to time we get a call from a customer whose posters have faded. Inevitably, it’s because they have been getting a lot of UV exposure, either from sunlight or overhead fluorescent lighting. Most printing will fade in sunlight, but if you ask for our UV inks, their life in sunlight will be much longer.

The picture at the right shows four large format prints that have been displayed next to a store window for a few years. They were printed with our regular inks- not UV. What’s interesting is how the poster on the lower left, which is closest to the window and lower, is the most faded. The ones above, hardly at all because they are shaded by a window awning. The one further back gets less sun too and is less faded.
When we see posters fading that are not subject to sun exposure, it’s usually because they are very close to a fluorescent fixture.
When you order UV inks on your poster, you get inks that do not fade with UV exposure. The manufacturers say they are good for 2-5 years in the sun, and our experience bears this out. The new HP machines that we use have excellent color fidelity with UV inks, much better than we were able to get in the past. You can get your brilliant reds with the new inks, and they will stay that way!
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Photo Enlargement on a Matte Vinyl Banner

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Jay Buckley
Vinyl Banner as an office photograph
Office Photo Banner

One fun thing about this business is that you see something new every day! In this case our customer wanted to hang a photo in their office. After much talking about how this was going to work, we settled on printing the photo on our matte vinyl, and putting pole pockets top and bottom for displaying it.

To the right is a photo of the final enlarged photo in place, and we think it looks fantastic! The poles top and bottom real add a nice accent, and it’s a great presentation over all. By doing this on vinyl, they have something that is durable and will not fade in the sun. In this case that’s important because the piece is placed right next to a window.
We’ve done a fair number of these since an article appeared in Country Living Magazine about doing this. The article spoke about how to put photo enlargements in places like a porch or patio, where moisture issues make a regular photo in a frame problematic. Our outdoor matte vinyl make this easy, and eye catching!
Of course, we do a lot of photo enlargements on paper, with subsequent mounting on gator board, for your typical office photograph of company products, building, and people.
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