Some building exteriors are designed and constructed with a goal of making an authentic, artistic and architectural impression. For example, Longaberger, in Newark, Ohio, built its corporate headquarters to look like its product—a giant hand-woven basket. I'm not into baskets, but I know a building impression when I see one. This company, along with its team of designers and builders, capitalized on the power of building strong visual impressions to make its business more interesting. The extreme uniqueness of Longaberger's exterior provides a better experience of its name and brand. 

Further east is a retail store called 5Wits, an interactive adventure venue. They are located in Foxboro, Massachusetts, at the Patriot Place retail complex of Gillette Stadium. Instead of fancy architecture, the company accomplishes its building impression through engaging graphics applied to the glass exterior of its storefront. What would otherwise appear as "just another store," 5Wits made its storefront a standout—one that earned the sign company that provided the company’s graphics a bronze "Gold Ink Award" from one of the industry's most prestigious annual competitions for printing. The award-winning sign company that did the job is The Sign Center. Dan Johansen is the company's general manager.

The opportunity came to Johansen and The Sign Center when 5Wits asked them to help create and install a compelling visual to the store's massive but underutilized glass facade. The goal was to drive traffic to the venue's interactive experience.

"The building is part of a retail complex with lots of foot traffic," Johansen says. "But people didn't always know or notice what they were walking past. This was an opportunity to make all that glass work for them."

After a long and brutal New England winter, Johansen met with 5Wits director of marketing John Pandiscio to discuss the re-facing of an awning and options for signage to promote the attraction. John expressed his desire to capitalize on the building’s glass face to attract new visitors and pull people into the venue. Up to that point, the company had only leveraged the exterior glass walls with selective but smaller pieces of printed displays.

For Johansen, this opportunity came at the right time to enable his company to take advantage of its new print capabilities that it gained by acquiring a new EFI VUTEk QS2 Pro printer. The Sign Center had recently upgraded printers by investing in the new technology that allowed them to print onto rigid substrates and print on both sides of those substrates.

"Using that new printer," Johansen says, "we’d just recently completed installing a series of inkjet-printed panels on a glass-encased skyway at a local shopping mall that featured our newly introduced printing process that leverages the VUTEk’s multi-layer print option. We found that we could create vibrant, rich double-sided images on our standard Oracal clear material and print three layers of ink simultaneously on the substrate; CMYK – White – CMYK.  This creates a viewable image on both sides that would be seen from both inside and outside the building with the same color quality on both sides."

With a sample to show 5Wits, Johansen was able to demonstrate to them how to promote the business on a large scale and with impact.

"With over 80 feet of glass storefront, we had a big palette to work with," Johansen says.  

After discussing content it was determined that 5Wits already had some high-resolution images that would support its brand and display well in this large format. Eventually it narrowed the choices down to two images. At this point, The Sign Center could go to work on creating proofs and begin the production file preparation that would require the two images to be broken apart into 32 separate panels that would be tiled together for the final display.

To speed production of file preparation, “i-Cut” software from ESKO helped automate much of the image tiling process that otherwise would have taken many more hours of detailed work to achieve manually. Similar to other paneled vinyl installation jobs, The Sign Center had to factor in bleeds and cut paths into the tiling process in order to ensure that each panel would flow to the next as if it were one large, continuous image. Once the panels were produced, the installation was completed in one day by their team of installation professionals.

In the end, this 20' by 80' exterior wall of glass had become a spectacular visual building impression.

"It is awesome," Johansen says of the final outcome. "A display like this is a way to capitalize on all that real estate and let people know that there is something in there waiting for them."