LexJet brandUP: A Tail-Wagging-Worthy Business Décor Upgrade

For a shop that caters to cuddly cuteness all day long, Average Joe’s Grooming‘s new space was a little bland. Although the walls were painted cheery sky blue and mint green, the owners Brittany Fenner and Tracey Barette knew their workplace décor could use an infusion of personality to match their happy, furry clients.

That’s where the LexJet brandUP crew came in to create and install custom graphics and photography that was both fun and functional. The team started with the most pressing issue: the front window.

LexJet brandUP: Cat Depot Redux

Welcome to the first installment of LexJet brandUP! This is a series created by our intrepid interns who journeyed out into LexJet’s hometown community, in and around Sarasota, Fla., and found several businesses and non-profit organizations that could use a little branding makeover with the help of wide-format graphics.

First up, they headed to Cat Depot, an organization devoted to rescuing homeless cats, offering low-cost veterinary services, finding new homes for cats and providing education. The non-profit is well-known in the community, but like many others, had relied on make-shift ways to present its messaging, such as posters adhered to windows with scotch tape. It didn’t take long to discover many ways our technology could jazz the center up.

Walls to Windows: Creative Interior Imagery Makes a Perfect Match

 

Creative Interior Imagery
Creative Interior Imagery not only seamlessly carried the “tree” theme from walls to windows (from left to right), but perfectly matched the interior paint.

Creative Interior Imagery, based in West Pittson, Pa., merged interior décor and design with digital printing for a medical center that wanted something less conventional and more inviting for its patients.

Eric Marsico, a partner at Creative Interior Imagery with Keith Tomkins, recommended hundreds of feet of wall and window murals to carry the common “tree” theme recommended by the medical center’s architect throughout much of the facility.

“They were hesitant at first because they had used wall murals on other projects that didn’t hold up. We pitched LexJet Velvet WallPro SUV with ClearShield Wall Armor and found that the stuff is tough when partnered together. We beat it up in the shop to test it beforehand and it held up really well,” says Tomkins.

Atrium Decor PrintingFor the windowed nurses’ station Tomkins chose LexJet Simple Perforated Window Vinyl (70/30). The trick was to ensure a perfect match from walls to windows. Not only that, but Tomkins took great pains to match the interior paint as well.

“They painted their building with a specific paint color, so we went to the paint manufacturer’s website, pulled those paint numbers, and plugged them in to make sure we matched their paint. We got the RGB formulations, converted them to CMYK and incorporated those colors into the graphic. They were impressed with how closely our prints matched their paint colors. You can’t tell where the wallpaper ends and the paint starts,” says Tomkins.

Tomkins adds that to ensure a seamless transition along the walls through the windows and back onto the walls from panel to panel he took pictures of the empty spaces and manually lined everything up instead of using the tiling function in the RIP software.

Creative Interior Imagery
The combination of GigaPan photography printed on LexJet Velvet WallPro SUV with an Epson SureColor S30670 brings the tree theme to life in the main atrium.

In addition to the vector tree art that adorns the walls and windows, Creative Interior Imagery installed a gigantic photo of a tree Tomkins found and captured in a local park. Tomkins photographed the tree with his GigaPan camera so that fine details would be apparent in the final print, also on LexJet Velvet WallPro and protected with Wall Armor.

“They wanted the tree to go up the wall and across the ceiling so you felt like you were sitting underneath it. I took the shot going up the trunk and through the canopy. By the time it was done it was a 1.2-gigapixel image. It’s 11 feet off the ground, goes up 19 feet and across the ceiling 14 or 15 feet and is about 10-12 feet wide. The resolution is amazing. If you get right up to it you can see the texture in the bark; it’s just like you’re standing in front of the tree,” says Tomkins.

Tomkins adds that this is the company’s largest project to date and that the combination of the right materials and a precise color management system made it a successful project sure to bring similar projects through the doors in the future.

Creative Interior Imagery“We spend a lot of time working with profiling software. We have an i1 and custom-profile all of our media. There are manufacturing tolerances in everything – printer, ink and media – and when we do it in-house we can get it spot on, like we did with the paint colors, which shows how the profiling helps. That’s one of the things that sets us apart, and when you get into a major project like using different materials and matching décor and paint color management is a big issue,” explains Tomkins. “And, at nighttime when the inside is lit, you can see it from the highway and it looks fantastic.”

The project was printed on Creative Interior Imagery’s Epson SureColor S30670 low-solvent printer. To illustrate the tight color tolerances Creative Interior Imagery’s color management system can produce, Tomkins recently created a gigapan wall mural of New York City using 12 different inkjet media on four different printers (the S30670, and the Epson Stylus Pro 11880, 7900 and 4880).

“With this 2 1/2′ x 6′ mural in our showroom we can show people how their print will look on the different media and show off our color matching skills, because that’s difficult to do,” says Tomkins. “The architectural firm did a walk-through of the medical center with interior designers after we installed the murals, and person who was leading the group remarked that no one else could match the quality of the materials and workmanship, so we were feeling pretty smug about that.”