Creating and Applying Bowl-Worthy Graphics that Stick

Applying graphics to a stadium

The AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic has a storied history in the annals of college football. For most of its 77-year history, this big game used to be played in the actual Cotton Bowl Stadium at Fair Park in Dallas, but is now played at the state-of-the-art Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.

Wall graphics for a football gameThe new venue requires an equally state-of-the-art approach to the myriad of graphics that cover the stadium to promote the big game, recognizing the teams and branding the bowl, and that’s where E.H. Teasley & Co. steps in.

E.H. Teasley & Co., based in Dallas, has been producing and installing the graphics for the Cotton Bowl for the past 18 years – the last four at Cowboys Stadium. The difficult and time-consuming task of wall graphics installations at Cowboys Stadium has been much easier with the use of Photo Tex Repositionable Fabric.

Applying graphics to elevator doors“We spent the first two years trying to find something that would adhere to the concrete walls. We tested a material during the summer before the initial opening of the stadium and that material seemed to work perfectly, but when we applied the vinyl a week before the game, in the winter months, the ambient temperature of the concrete had dropped considerably. The next day, we received a call from the Cotton Bowl folks telling us that a majority of our stickers had fallen off the walls. After all of our testing we were very surprised. We found a way to fix the signs that failed, but it made the project much more difficult and time-consuming,” says Jeff Teasley, owner of E.H. Teasley & Co. “In 2011 we were lucky to find PhotoTex. It’s a lighter weight material, and the adhesion properties are so much better than what we used for the prior game. To make sure we were on the right track before the game installation, we took it to a business near us with stucco-type walls. The graphic stayed up there for months in all of the outdoor elements. Seeing this, we felt confident that Photo Tex would do the job. Now we could sleep at night.”

Branding a hotel lobby with large signsThe graphics were printed on the company’s superwide solvent printers, which included a quantity of 352 four foot by four foot die-cut helmets and logos cut on a Zund cutter. These graphics lined the various levels of the stadium, the tunnels where the teams enter the field, as well as the lobbies of the host hotels. The hotel elevators were also branded with Photo Tex graphics.

“The elevator graphics were a lot better with the Photo Tex product. With the vinyl we were using before, people would tend to pick at it because it was thicker, where the Photo Tex is thinner and appeared to be painted on the door. Not one of the Photo Tex Graphics peeled off of any of the elevators. We used the EX version in a couple of places where we thought it might need a little more adhesion, and overall it went very smoothly this year and we were extremely pleased,” adds Teasley.