Unlike Peter Gibbons who took a chainsaw to his cubicle to improve his view in Office Space, with the help of some wide format technology and some cool creative people, using print to freshen up your four walls is fast, easy and affordable – even when customized!
Last year at SGIA Expo in Las Vegas I met Antony Neely from Signazon in Dallas. He attended my session on Print Buyers, and then we ended up in other sessions together, had a great time, and I got him to join Twitter! We kept in touch and then I saw him again at an event in Dallas and we started talking about all the cool things you could do with wide format. He mentioned a couple of projects they were working on, and I asked if he’s be interested in sharing some info with us and viola! … I received this post from Will Parsons, Marketing Associate at Signazon… enjoy!
The Wide Format Office
Businesses decorate their offices and lobbies with amazing murals and displays; more than just the simple wallpaper of an average home. But how do you get such accurate, large scale, images without hiring a master painter? The answer is that you print it out.
The whole project started with a simple request to “feel like a part of the bigger story.” That was all the guidance provided for the project. So Signazon stepped in with a blank slate and blank walls. But with effort and a lot of printing they were able to build exactly what the people of Blue Lynx Media were looking for; an office that gave a feeling of something bigger on the inside. Murals of classic media locations and the progression of broadcast media in a timeline filled the halls of the company to tie its employees in with their own background and make them a part of history.
The printing itself took a lot of custom work. Some of the elements are merely printed and then cut out, like the gatorboard lobby sign. The mural behind the lobby sign is printed out like custom wallpaper. For this printing, Signazon actually had to get a custom material to print on as the regular vinyl would not work as well. In the end, a low tack printable fabric with a stippled texture was used. Meaning the graphics were easily printed out, peeled off, and stuck onto the wall. With the material ready and the designs created it was a simple matter of printing out the wall displays.
An additional garnish to the walls was added in the form of newspapers mounted on the walls. A much smaller objective; the newspapers were printed and framed before being set along each of the walls. The larger newspapers were much more difficult. Made from a durable 3 mil PVC, the printed décor is much heavier and required more than just a simple adhesive. Instead, magnets were mounted in the wall behind the printed wall overlay. Metal plates were then installed into recesses behind the printed newspapers allowing them to be hung on the wall without damaging the overlay behind. The usefulness is doubled by the fact that you can print out new displays and mount them in the same way with ease.
For all of this you’d expect weeks’ worth of painting and working from a temporary office somewhere else while people moved furniture and took up space. Except it didn’t; the entire project took around 4 days to print and 4 days to install (with some of those days running concurrently). From drab grey walls to a themed office with stellar décor in a week; that’s the power of using a large format printer effectively!
Connect with Signazon on Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn
One Response
Excellent work. It has indeed made a difference with regards to the look and the space. It really depends on how it is being designed though.