LexJet Named to Digital Output’s Top 50 Readers’ Choice Awards

Digital Output magazine recently named LexJet as one of the companies selected by its readers for the 20th annual Top 50 Readers’ Choice Awards.

Digital Output Top 50 Readers' Choice AwardsEach year Digital Output’s readership dictates the top 50 winners and ten honorable mentions. Using the magazine’s Web site metric system, www.DOdirect.net, the magazine tallies readers’ interest in companies throughout the year. This is done through requests made on print and Web editorial and advertisements as seen in the magazine, on the Web site, or in Digital Output’s weekly newsletter the Digital Queue.

“The Top 50 Readers’ Choice Awards identify some of the most innovative vendors in the graphic arts,” says Tom Tetreault, editor-in-chief/publisher, Digital Output.

The full list and accompanying article will appear in the November issue of Digital Output, in both the print and digital publications, which will be distributed on Oct. 27.

Three LexJet product innovations will be included in the Top 50 feature:

  • Sunset Photo Canvas Paper 230g: This new photo paper is LexJet’s popular Premium Archival Matte Paper embossed with a canvas texture, complete with all the benefits of Premium Archival Matte: an instant-dry coating for smudge-free printing and handling; a large color gamut for high-contrast, high-resolution printing; and an acid-free, pH-neutral thick and heavy base for trouble-free printing, mounting and framing.
  • LexJet 8 Mil Production Satin SUV 180g: Geared toward high-volume production work that requires a balance of quality and economy, this satin-finish production paper features a high-performance, instant-dry, scratch-resistant base for posters, photo reproductions, point-of-purchase displays, and other commercial applications. It’s compatible with solvent, low-solvent, UV-curable and latex printers.
  • LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric: Provides true photo-quality printing on a bright-white fabric base backed with a repositionable, removable adhesive that makes it easy to apply, reposition, remove and re-use graphics on virtually any flat surface. It removes cleanly with no adhesive residue.

Clear Lake Press Prints Nostalgic Office Décor

Wall Mural by Clear Lake Press

Eric Erickson, prepress systems administrator for Clear Lake Press, Waseca, Minn., loves LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric, and is sticking it everywhere to give customers and prospects a bigger-than-life visual of what they can do with the printable adhesive-back fabric.

The nostalgic photo above was applied at the offices of Clear Lake Press to illustrate the eye-catching displays that can be easily and economically created in similar settings. Erickson has also created visuals in various forms and formats for other environments, like cubicle and bedroom walls.

Cubicle Decor by Clear Lake Press
Clear Lake Press made a cubicle more livable with a view using LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric.

“We’re trying to provide some creative ways of using it, more than just rectangles on walls. You make up something, show it off, and it helps spark ideas for use in their home or business,” says Erickson.

Erickson adds that the unique adhesive, which makes it easy to re-position, remove and re-use is also a big selling point to customers.

“Now that we have offered Print-N-Stick and are showing it off, a lot of people have been asking about it. For instance, we printed some artwork for the Waseca United Way from the front of their brochure. We made a large graphic out of it with Print-N-Stick for use at local businesses to put on their walls and promote the United Way. When they’re done with the promotion, they can peel it off and put it back on the backing paper and hold onto it for future use,” says Erickson.

Printed Wall Graffiti by Clear Lake Press
Wall murals don’t have to be plain rectangles as this cut-out printed wall graffiti illustrates.

For the classic kids’ lemonade stand photo from 1967, Erickson asked the Waseca County Historical Society, a long-time customer, if he could use the photo for their wall. The Historical Society was happy to oblige (with the requisite “be careful with the photo” instructions) and Erickson scanned the original 6 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ black-and-white photo.

The photo was scanned with a desktop Epson scanner and brought into Photoshop for touch-up to get the right tone, and blown up to its final wall mural size of 12′ x 8′. The image was printed in two panels on the company’s Canon iPF8300 and applied horizontally with the help of employees Tonya Wittman and Cory Stencel.

Wall Graphics by Clear Lake Press
Clear Lake Press printed this baby room decor with Print-N-Stick Fabric.

“There’s a little bit of an overlap that you can see. This was our first time applying more than one panel and we learned from the experience. Next time, we’ll include an overlap and slice it right down the middle and take off the excess for a clean, exact cut,” says Erickson. “We love the material and the way the bright white point on the fabric reproduces artwork, whether it’s black-and-white or full color. The coordinator at the Historical Society was thrilled with the mural.

Printing and Sticking Custom Wedding DVD Photo Covers

Custom DVD Cover by Mark Hawkins Photography

Mark and Kelly Hawkins own and operate a high-end wedding photography studio in Green Bay, Wis., where a personal, customized experience for the bride and groom is job one. To elevate their print products, the couple invested in a Canon iPF8400 wide-format inkjet printer they picked up from LexJet and their personal printer specialist, Rob Finkel.

LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric DVD CoverMark has also struck up a friendship with Andy Wredberg, owner of AW Artworks in Sun Prairie, Wis., whose work shows up regularly here at the LexJet Blog. Andy helped Mark take the printer upgrade plunge, a plunge that Mark says made a big splash.

“We only shoot about 30 weddings per year and we want them to get the highest value possible, so the more customization we can do, the better. The Canon is such an easy printer to use, and the Photoshop plug-in that comes with it also makes it super-simple,” Mark says. “I told Rob yesterday that the bottom line is that when I hit that print button it’s exactly the way it looks on my monitor; the LexJet profiles are dead-on with pretty much every media type. It’s mind-blowing. Time is money, and I don’t want to waste time, ink and material, and with this printer I don’t.”

Mark Hawkins PhotographyAfter a wedding, Mark and Kelly deliver two main print products: a wedding album and a wall collage. Mark says that one of the reasons they got the printer was to deliver bigger and better wall collages to their clients.

“What spurred the purchase of the iPF8400 was to do some higher-end artwork; not just canvas wraps, but art paper and boutique applications for the wedding market. There are a lot of cool uses for a variety of print media in the wedding market. People spend all this money already, so they should have nice custom printed products,” Mark says.

The client also gets a DVD of all the photos from the wedding, but Mark ran into an issue when he ran out of DVD cases. The new Canon printer and LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric came to the rescue, not only giving Mark a workaround on deadline, but a new way to present DVDs to clients.

“We were out of the cases yesterday, so I used some scrap art paper that I cut to size and folded in half, printed a nice image from the wedding on one side and the photo release for the DVD on the other side that gives them permission to do whatever they want with the images. That way you don’t have to use another piece of paper to print a release, so it kills two birds with one stone. Plus, the Print-N-Stick makes it easy to take it off and reapply it if I don’t align it correctly,” Mark says. “I love having a fully customizable product that gives us an opportunity to recycle and re-use materials that would otherwise go to waste.”

Print-N-Stick Fabric and the Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field

Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame Exhibit Triad Creative Group

Triad Creative Group recently completed a Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame exhibit called Touchdown! for the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay, Wis. So I asked Triad’s project manager, John Toth, a rhetorical (or stupid; you make the call) question: “So… Are you a Packers’ fan?” There was a pause, a chuckle, and, “Absolutely!”

Knowing that Triad Creative Group is located in nearby Brookfield, I should have known better. Still, it had to be asked, because being a fan would make the project that much sweeter, and it was.

Photo Mural Triad Creative GroupHowever, it wasn’t easy. Perhaps the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of the project was typing in the names of each and every Packer Hall of Famer, then adjusting their individual hand-sketched portraits that would ring the walls surrounding the trophy case.

It’s a temporary exhibit at the museum that runs through Feb. 28, 2015, but it doesn’t look temporary, thanks to the work of Triad Creative Group, which also builds custom structures for exhibits and trade shows through its division Rent-Ex. The look of permanence was important to Toth, from the structures surrounding the exhibits to the graphics applied to them.

Triad Creative Group Exhibit“It was challenging in that they didn’t have a large budget, and we came up with the best way to represent the exhibit with the budget they had. We built those walls so they could use them again for different applications,” explains Toth. “And, with the Print-N-Stick Fabric from LexJet they can pull off the graphics without damaging the surface and use the walls for whatever they want. Without the Print-N-Stick material it just wouldn’t work.”

Toth says they use Print-N-Stick Fabric almost exclusively for their booth rental business because the graphics can be easily peeled off, rolled back up on the release liner and the customer can store and re-use them as needed.

Green Bay Packer Trophy Case Triad Creative Group“It’s a win-win-win all the way down the line. It’s a wonderful product. It goes down very easily; it’s extremely forgiving. If it sticks to itself it’s very easy to get it off. I show it to clients and wad it up in my hands, pull it back apart and stick it back up. You’ll be darned if you can find a crease in it; it’s amazing,” says Toth. “The imaging quality is absolutely fantastic. We’ve done everything from product shots to the faces in the Hall of Fame exhibit that were hand sketched. Everything, including the small copy, was crisp and legible. We use the HP Latex Printer. It doesn’t require a laminate, so there are increased savings and value there. And, it’s very easy to trim.”

For the Hall of Fame exhibit they wrapped each 24-foot-long wall section in Green Bay green with the sketches and info about each Hall of Famer on Print-N-Stick Fabric. Black-and-white photo murals of classic Packer football moments were added to the inside curved corners of the wall facing the main displays. Triad Creative Group also built the trophy case, complete with motion sensors to prevent potential theft of the priceless NFL championship and Super Bowl trophies housed inside.

“The photo murals are 4′ x 9′ feet and even with the curve of the wall they went down in one fell swoop; we had them down in ten minutes,” says Toth. “With the exposure this gets the images have to look high-quality, and they looked fantastic when they were finished.”

Using Print-N-Stick Fabric as an Art and Photo Medium at Elizabeth’s Art Gallery

Print-N-Stick Fabric Demo
Bethany, an employee at Elizabeth’s Art Gallery, shows how they have been printing, sticking, peeling, crumpling and re-applying LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric.

As you can tell from recent posts at the LexJet Blog, print shops, artists and photographers are finding creative ways to use the versatile LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric. At Elizabeth’s Art Gallery in Goderich, Ontario, Canada, its most recent photo exhibition, DPI 2014, features Print-N-Stick Fabric.

The proprietor of Elizabeth’s Art Gallery, Elizabeth Van den Broeck, is a custom framer, fine-art printer, painter and photographer. And, Elizabeth’s Art Gallery is not only a gallery, but a custom frame shop, fine-art print shop and art supply store that also holds workshops for children and adults, hosts art and camera clubs (the current exhibition is for a camera club), and is active in the local arts community.

Elizabeth's Art Gallery
Some of the photo art printed on LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric at the DPI 2014 exhibition at Elizabeth’s Art Gallery.

“I’m always looking for something different to print, paint and make images on; that’s always been my quest: to find different ways of looking at images. I’m also an equipment collector. I like having access to everything I could want. I like being able to do everything from absolute scratch,” says Elizabeth. “Everyone is doing canvas and different photo and fine art papers. We’re looking for other ways to work with photos. In addition to Print-N-Stick we’ve been experimenting with photo-sensitive dyes on fabric, and of course, the traditional canvas and photo prints.”

The DPI 2014 exhibit is just the beginning of Elizabeth’s use of Print-N-Stick. As part of a public art group, Elizabeth is looking for ways to provide seasonal public art, as opposed to permanent pieces. She calls it a “back-door deal” that literally makes use of the back doors in Goderich.

“I’m thinking it would be cool to do temporary pieces that can be applied and removed with no indication they were there. I want to apply art with Print-N-Stick to my whole back door and see if we can do the back doors of the back alleys of all the spaces in the town square, so it’s kind of a back-door deal,” she says.

Elizabeth already has a test piece on her back door that she says has been “seriously mistreated,” meaning that it’s been crumpled up, applied to various surfaces, peeled off and applied again, finally on the back door. “The print quality is perfect, and it’s very easy to apply,” she adds.

Elizabeth's Art Gallery
One of Elizabeth’s encaustic paintings, which won Best in Show at Paint Ontario.

Elizabeth has an Epson Stylus Pro 9900 that she’s had for the past five years. The printer, through no fault of its own, has a mind of its own sometimes. The printer was a victim of an F3 tornado that ripped through Goderich in 2011, damaging or destroying most of the buildings and ripping out all the trees in a park adjacent to Elizabeth’s building.

Elizabeth’s Art Gallery sustained roof and water damage and was out of commission for about eight months. It could have been worse, as the building next door was completely torn away by the tornado.

That’s probably why Elizabeth describes her business, beyond its eclectic photo and art mix, as “enduring.” She’s been in business for 22 years and has been printing since the inception of digital printing back in the ‘90s.

Elizabeth's Art Gallery
A sampling of some of Elizabeth’s oil paintings. Check out the collection of her work at www.elizabeths.ca under ELIZABETH’S ART.

You should check out her magnificent original paintings, which you can find at www.elizabeths.ca under ELIZABETH’S ART. There you’ll find her encaustic, pastel, oil, acrylic and textured acrylic paintings.

“I try to push colors and paint negative space. I paint the space between things first, so that whatever the subject is, they just arrive,” she says.

Celebrating UW Wrestling with Print-N-Stick Fabric

University of Wisconsin Photo Wall Mural
Photograph used for the photo wall mural, printed on LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric by AW Artworks, by David Stluka Photography.

It’s a request that’s becoming more common: Can you put up graphics and murals that I can easily tear down and replace without damaging the wall? Andy Wredberg, owner of AW Artworks in Sun Prairie, Wis., has just the print material for that request: LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric.

The University of Wisconsin’s wrestling program was looking for replaceable graphics featuring its current wrestling team national tournament qualifiers, and a photo wall mural for its offices.

Pillar Prints by AW Artworks“We applied the images of their national qualifiers to the big concrete pillars that run through the wrestling center. They have summer camps in the center and wanted something the kids would see and aspire to while they’re in there,” explains Wredberg. “The surface of each pillar is rough and has a lot of imperfections, but the Print-N-Stick contoured to the surface variances really well.”

Wredberg printed six poster-sized images (18” x 36”) for the wrestling center pillars. To ensure an even presentation across the wrestling center, Wredberg added Bucky Badger, UW’s mascot, to the mix since there were five national qualifiers represented.

Bucky Badger printed on LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric“With the tight weave and bright white point and the Print-N-Stick Fabric, the blacks are blacker and it has a richness you don’t typically see in a fabric,” says Wredberg.

For the office mural, Wredberg printed three and half 44”-wide panels applied vertically from ceiling to floor. The photo mural commemorates the record-breaking attendance (more than 10,000) at the most recent Big Ten wrestling tournament held at UW’s arena. David Stluka Photography captured the image from the Big Ten tournament used for the photo wall mural print.

“To make sure everything lined up we picked a few of the elements – the signs and banners going across the picture horizontally – to key off of. The whole thing went up quickly and easily; I was pleasantly surprised. From start to finish, including taking all the furniture out, installation and trimming, it took about an hour and a half. I couldn’t be more pleased,” says Wredberg.

LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric
Mission accomplished: The boring Jumbotron image was seamlessly replaced, actually covered up, with a swatch of Print-N-Stick emblazoned with the Wisconsin logo.

As a final touch, Wredberg is changing the image on the Jumbotron in the photo. Actually, he’s not replacing it, but printing a new image to be placed over it on Print-N-Stick Fabric. We’ll add a photo of the updated mural to this post when it’s been applied, so check back to see how it turned out.

“After we applied the mural they asked if we could put something different on the Jumbotron because the current image is kind of boring. So, we measured it, I’ll print the image, trim it to size and cover up that little section. It will be pretty seamless. You would be hard-pressed to do that with other materials and have it look as good as it does with Print-N-Stick,” adds Wredberg.