Protecting your print from fading

If you've ever left a magazine on a window sill for a month or two, you'll be familiar with fading. Most printing inks will fade when exposed to UV light. And, since fluorescent lighting also emits UV, it can happen to prints hanging in your office, even if they are not getting direct sunlight from your window.

To keep your prints from fading, we need to use UV stable inks. Anything that is going in a window, or that will be up for years, should be printed with them. UV inks are good for up to two years in sunlight, and just about forever (well, OK, 20 years) in a normal office environment. Trade Show graphics and meeting signs are used for just a few days, and we find that UV inks are not normally required.

People often ask about using lamination to reduce the amount of UV that reaches the print. This is a throwback to the days before we had UV inks. While our testing does show that lamination slows fading, it does not stop it. We think the solution is really to use the inks that do not fade.

The good news is that the latest HP equipment gives excellent color with UV inks. Older equipment did not give us good reds, and we had to make tough choices between color fidelity and longevity. Today, you can get both. Less filling, and tastes great!

More Cutouts!

We've done a lot of cutouts lately, and they are fun! Here's a customer clowning around with one that they brought to a trade show. We've also seen a lot of them being done for promotions, events, and retail stores.

When people talk about green shoots in the economy, this is our guage- that people are having fun again. Since a lot of cutouts are done for fun things like events, we are calling a turn in the economy. You heard it here first!

Wine Winners

We've had a lot of fun doing blowups of wine labels for Charity Hop, a company that markets the bottling of wine in partnership with a
number of sports celebrities to raise money for charity.

Here are pictures of Mark Buehrle of the White Sox and Derrek Lee of the Cubs with their wine labels. Not only did they turn out great, but we turned them around in four hours!

The best part of all was going to the launch of the Red Sox players wines in Fenway park last year. Good wine, too, we might add. Over the last few years, Charity Hop has released over 30 wines in conjunction with pro athletes, and raised $1.4 million for charity.

Big Mounted Pieces

Here's an interesting job we did recently.
Our customer, Kenyon International, needed
a two sided gatorboard mounted graphic 73x85" for their trade show booth. We printed it as two pieces 36.5" wide, and were able to cut the pieces so the seam is almost invisible.

Because of the size, we couldn't ship the job via our normal Fedex, so we put it in a van and dropped it off on the way to a visit with the folks!

We do lots of trade show work, everything from board mounted graphics to vinyl banners. We have the experience in helping thousands of companies get their graphics done right, on time, and affordably!

Clear Vinyl Window Cling

Here are some pictures of a fun job we printed recently.

This was for a pet grooming business. They wanted something that would allow the inside of their store to be seen from the sidewalk, but still put pictures of happy pets in the window.

We printed photos on clear cling with our solvent HP 9000 printer. The material was installed in their window using a felt squeege and adhesive vinyl application fluid.







Clear window cling is durable, easy to install, and you can see through the clear cling like stained glass! We also offer white cling for those who want a white background.

The cost is less than many other window applications, such as stenciling, so it is easier on your wallet too.

When the time comes to change the graphics, cling will peel right off the window.

Little Cutouts

Here's a fun job we did over the last few days- little cutouts! The parents of a group of four high school chums wanted to do something special for their high school graduation party. We printed twenty pictures of the boys, laminated them and mounted them to gatorboard, and then cut them out and put easel stands on the back. They will be used as table center pieces. How fun!

Museum Displays

We've done several museum displays recently, and thought they might be of interest.

Here's an octagonal table with six display panels surrounding a backlit tabletop. The display is at the Des Moines County Heritage Center, Burlington Iowa, and was designed by Will Thompson of Armadillo Arts. The view is from above.

Museums often have large wall spaces to cover with pictures of natural settings, historical photos, etc. Our wallpaper does the trick!

And, of course, you will want a vinyl banner announcing your latest exhibit.

Here's one of our banners outside of the New Hampshire Historical Society, announcing their exhibit of the work of nature photographer Ralph Larrabee.