Poster printing for Museum Displays

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Museum Display
Museum Display

Here’s an interesting job we did for a museum in the midwest.  The center of the display is a backlit print.  Around the perimeter are standard gatorboard mounted museum display prints with a matte laminate.

Museum displays are fun for us, especially the historical photos.  Our state of the art setup makes sure your black and white photos are really black and white, without a color cast that can happen when you put a grayscale photo in a color piece.
We usually print this kind of poster with UV stable inks so they last for a very long time, and laminate to protect the paper from the hands of the public.
Typically, the museum sends us digital files ready to print, but we also can help with the graphic design if you need that.
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Banners as building decoration

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Banner for Decoration

Banner for Decoration

Here’s a photo of banners we did for the Forest Service when they built a new White Mountain headquarters in Campton, NH. They are fabric banners instead of our usual vinyl banners, but other than that, pretty much the same sort of thing.

We started with historical and publicity photos that they had in their collection, scanning, cropping and resampling for the size they needed to be. They were then printed on a Fisher Textiles polyester fabric that has been flame retarded.  The banners were printed on an HP 10000 solvent printer that uses eco-solvent inks.  We sewed pole pockets top and bottom, and used 1″ dowels in the top to keep them straight and 5/8″  dowels in the bottom pocket for weight.

The Forest Service is very happy with the results, and we are too!  We are going to miss them as neighbors, however. They were right next door until they built their new building one exit north on I93.

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Recycling our poster paper

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Paper Baler
Paper Baler

Our poster printing generates a fair amount of paper scrap every day, and Alex decided it was time for us to do a better job of recycling.  He built a baler to allow us to bundle our scraps together to bring to the recycling center.  We put out trash cans in which only paper goes, and then make a few bales about the size of a hay bale every week.

Not only does it make us feel good about being green, but it has allowed us to keep the same size dumpster as we have grown. It also means that a lot less material goes into the landfill from us.
We’ve also done a number of other things to be greener-  like carpooling to work, turning the heat down to 65 degrees, and putting inserts in our windows to make another layer of insulation.
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Trade Show Booth for $700

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Economy Retractable Banner Stands

Economy Retractable Banner Stands

Here’s a great way to do a trade show backdrop dramatically and inexpensively. Three economy banner stands side-by-side create a booth that looks great, and costs less than $700. In this case we made the banner stands for Missouri Prime Hunts.

When placed at the back of a trade show booth the three banner stands are eight feet wide, which leaves enough space for a small table to put your literature on.  You can carry the banner stands into the trade show hall, and be set up and ready to go inside of five minutes!

Our rules for doing a trade show effectively are to have something colorful, and six words or less that will interest your target customer.  This booth does both quite effectively!  As it should, since we also did the graphic design for the booth. If you don’t have a graphic designer who does your design work, we have six who are experienced in the design of effective trade show graphics.

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Poster Printing for Meeting Signs

Posted on January 22, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Meeting Signs

Meeting Signs

If you are putting on a meeting of almost any kind, large format printing is going to be helpful.  You’ll have needs for signage to announce where things are, to tell people where to go, and to announce what’s happening in a particular rooom.  All this can be done in a day or two, affordably and very professionally.

One thing that can save you a ton of money is to do the graphic design yourself in PowerPoint.  This saves you the expense of a graphic designer, and since you are going to need to communicate all the information to a designer, it’s not that much more work to put that information into a PowerPoint file that can be printed in large format.

We can also help with the graphic design if you need a little help getting everything prettied up.  Especially if you are in a hurry, this can be the way to go, and we’ll get proofs back to you withing a day.

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Vinyl banners as constructions signs

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Vinyl Banners for jobsite signs
Vinyl Banners for jobsite signs

Here’s an affordable way to make a sign announcing a new building.  Take a 4×8′ vinyl banner ande wrap a sheet of plywood with it. Attach the plywood to a stand or two posts, and you have a great jobsite sign.

We suggest that you glue the vinyl to the plywood with construction adhesive, and then wrap the vinyl around to the back and staple-gun it on.  You can order your banner with an extra few inches around for stapling.
Our outdoor vinyl is good for three to five years outdoors, so you’ll have plenty of time to get the building finished.  You’ll also find that this is a lot less expensive way of doing a jobsite sign than traditional signs designed to last for 20 years.
We did the vinyl banner on this sign for the Common Man restaurants here in NH.  They’ve been faithful customers, and a our favorite place to eat, for a long time.
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Poster Printing

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Stanchion Signs
Stanchion Signs

We print a lot of retail signs to go into 22×28 sign holders. A lot of people in the industry call them stanchion signs. You also see that mis-spelled a lot!

Stanchion signs are nice because they give you a nice size portable sign that requires no additional fixturing.  Set them wherever you need them and drop the sign in, and you are off to the races.
 
One thing that people often misunderstand about them is the width of the slot top at the through which the sign must be inserted.  The slot is really only about 1/8″ wide, and regular foamcore board, which is 3/16″ thick, won’t go in. We use a material called 50 point board for stanchion signs. It’s a lot like shirt board.  With paper and laminate, the sign we make is about 1/16″ thick, and goes into the stanchion sign easily.
We can make these retail store signs either single or double sided, and with a gloss or matte laminate on both sides to protect the printing.
The actual sign holder can be purchased from a number of different vendors. They cost about $50 each.
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Custom Printed Wallpaper for Lobbies

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Corporate Lobby Wallpaper
Corporate Lobby Wallpaper

Here’s some fun custom wallpaper we did for a customer in New York City for their lobby.  They used a greyscale photo of the New York skyline, and superimposed it onto multicolor backgrounds.  The stuff you can do today with Photoshop!

Each panel is 4×8 feet in size, making a total mural dimension of 8×12 feet.  We shipped them three sections of wallpaper each fifty inches wide, with two inches of overlap so the edges can be cut to match perfectly.

This is a pretty typical lobby installation.  The wallpaper took us a few days to make, and it took a day to be installed.

 

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Custom Printed Wallpaper in the home

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Custom Printed Wallpaper
Custom Printed Wallpaper

Here’s a custom printed wallpaper job we did for an elegant home in Boston.  It’s an 18th century painting of Mount Vernon that was chosen to go with the decor of the home and to give it a feel of that period in time.

Our customer purchased a high resolution photo of the painting, and we scaled, cropped, and resampled it to fit the size and give sufficient resolution.  A professional installer put up the wallpaper, which was 9.5 x 29.5 feet in size.
The results are stunning, don’t you agree?
What’s really cool here is the ability to put pictures of  just about anything that means a lot to you on the wall of  your home. Put up pictures of the kids, the family, the vacation house, or your favorite picture.  We have found that we can get excellent results from 5 and 6 megapixel pictures taken up to 8×10 foot size.
I’m scouring my photos from the last few years to put on the wall in my house!
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Custom Printed Wallpaper in the Office

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Jay Buckley
Custom Printed Wallpaper

Custom Printed Wallpaper

Here’s a fun wallpaper job we did recently for Domani Studios in Chicago.

They had a big, blank wall in their design area, and wanted  to dress it up with something that gave the space a creative feeling. We printed the wallpaper from their custom artwork.  While we usually see image files for wallpaper, this was an Adobe Illustrator file.  Not a problem! We can accept files from all the common graphic design programs.

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