I’ve recently come across a fun new tool from the design professionals at Adobe. It’s Kuler.

Kuler is an online respository of color themes that are sorted and voted on - a little Web 2.0 community for color enthusiasts. We’ve utilizied this tool when creating new murals, and are happy to use it again based on client request.

This tool is excellent for pulling up new ideas for mural use, as well as other A&D and printing projects, however one has to be cautioned that the colors here are not necessarily printable. Some colors are outside of the printing capability of many wide format printers. Color problems often occur with very light colors, very dark colors, greens, oranges, and flourescents/neons.

Articles Color

Color, Color, Color

As mentioned in previous posts, Interior Designers have a specific level of expectations when it comes to color matching as compared to the print professional.  Color match is usually done with a Pantone book, a hard match, fabric samples, tile samples, etc…. Custom mixed spot colors for everything.  As you and I know, this is NOT the case for the digital printer utilizing a  4, 6, 8, or even 10 color printing system.

Unfortunately, as a print professional, it is required that you help your client understand why certain colors can be matched, and why, certain colors, cannot. Read more…

Articles Color, Dimensions, Expectations

Not the actual mural, ha ha

I had a job for a series of commercial installation that I worked pre-press for, but I was not the original artist.  The target wall I was working with was 96′ to 106′ wide, depending on which site.  After we had installed several of these murals, I got a call from my installer asking:

Hey, why is there a map of the state of Florida here in the middle of this panel?  It doesn’t look right.

What had happened, was that the original artist was also working on a project for a retirement village is his home state of Florida.  He had accidentally copy-pasted this map locating the retirement village into my mural graphic.  The map size, when printed, was about 4′ by 4′.   I didn’t catch it because when I was working on the whole mural with 20 layers at 100′ wide, I didn’t even notice this out of place element.

What to do with errors on a wallcovering mural

I had to deal with a quanity of four 16′ errors on four differently sized murals.  I had to reprint each one individually.  Because of the size of the files, I did not save the fully layered Photoshop files, but only the flattened files.  This was a problem.

What I did

1. I open the original layered monstrosity, and then added a new layer consisting of a 20′ section of the previously printed design.  Thankfully they both have the same color profiles.
2. I aligned the layered components around the 20′ section until they matched.
3. I eliminated the 20′ section, leaving the layered components in the right areas.
4. I cropped the image down to a manageable 54″ section (54″ is a standard panel width for wallcovering, and it also manages to cover 4′ of image, plus plenty of bleed)
5. I had the section reprinted.  And the new installation WITH the existing install was no big deal.  I had a professional wallcovering installer splice the new and old together with a custom double cut splice.  He used an adhesive lovingly referred to as VOV, or Vinyl On Vinyl (adhesive) to make all of the new and old edges stay put.

But what about color matching?

Now, although I matched the color profiles of the files, that does NOT mean that the final output will match.  We have several issues to get past: Ink variations, print head temperature, humidity, and of course substrate batch color/texture.

Thankfully, for my situation, the wall mural had so many colors and so much visual noise, any color discrepancy did not matter.  If it DID make a difference, I would have had to have reprinted the entire mural.

Size Errors

Not all errors have to do with design.  Sometimes the mural is just too large, or too small.

• If it’s too large, hopefully you can just re-crop at the installation site.  I’ve had experience cropping off 10 feet of mural height with decent success.
• If it’s too small, you will likely be adding more image - consider all of your Photoshop/Illustrator options here- image mirroring, color fades, adding noise, duplicating elements.  Installing extra width or height can be handled as mentioned above.

Do you have any war stories of design or size issues?  Leave me a comment, or email me and I’ll post them.

Articles AddOns, Color, Errors, Replacements

One of the lovely surprises that many digital printers realize when printing on wallcovering is the fact that texture greatly affects the sheen of a print, and that sheen greatly affects perceived color.  Although this is highly obvious when using ’slower drying’ solvent inks, it can also be seen on UV prints as well.

Vinyl wallcovering, whether 15 oz, or 20oz thickness, will almost always have a texture.  These textures are added through embossing rolls during the calendering, or manufacturing process.  In general wallcovering applications- textures can range from paint strokes, to basket weaves, to dot patterns.  At a meager cost of $10k-$20k, some large volume wallcovering buyers can have their own logo embossed into their textured wallcovering.

The nooks and crannies and ‘valleys’, provide places for ink to hide.  The sometimes undercoated ‘hills’ of a texture provide underprinted areas that are often highly reflective.

There are two ways that this can be manifest in a print

1. Textures with Large Elements - (big valleys, big hills) - although possibly annoyingly shiny on the hills, the valleys offer a deep rich color that comes through.  This can be an attractive feature if your texture is brush strokes.
2. Textures with small elements - (little valleys, little hills) - the size of the varied facets of the wallcovering blend together to the eye, and appear to dull the color of the image.  This can be a great effect if you have a low key, low contrast image that does not require tight color matching, but can be devestating if you are looking for deep blacks, and vibrant colors.  These textures are often called ’suedes’, or to a lesser degree ’stipples’.

Articles Color, Texture