Magic Carpet Dyed

To make a splashy statement at the Night Club and Bar Convention held this past March in Las Vegas, SoBe Beverages hired Danbury, CT-based Enhance a Colour to produce several items for its trade show booth, including fabric backdrops, vinyl banner wraps, table-panel graphics, and most notably, a 20 x 40-ft dye-sublimated carpet crawling with SoBe’s signature lizards.

Graphics were designed in Adobe Illustrator by Launchpad Promotions (also based in Danbury), and then sent to Enhance a Colour. After receiving the files, Enhance a Colour color-corrected the images in Adobe Photoshop. Explains co-owner Jim O’Connor, “Most files that are printed [for] dye-sublimation printing need the mid-tones opened up.”

After reduced-size proofs were approved by the client, Enhance a Colour executed the final output of the trade show graphics. For the dye-sublimated materials, Enhance a Colour used its EFI Vutek FabriVu with FabriVu inks to image onto Beaver Papers TexPrint-GFO transfer media. Print time for the carpet graphics was 3 hours. The images for the carpet were then transferred onto the company’s type C short-term-use carpet with rubberized backing at 400?F using a heat calendar built by Enhance a Colour specifically for dye-sub carpets. The carpet was produced in two 123 x 480-in. panels with a 3-in. overlap. Transfer time was 2 hours and finishing time was 3 hours, the latter consisting of trimming and sewing the edges of the carpet with an N-C carpet sewing machine.

Again turning to its FabriVu and FabriVu inks, Enhance a Colour then output the backdrop graphics onto Beaver Papers TexPrint-GFO sublimation paper. The images were transferred onto Fisher GF 4744 Lite Mesh using a Klieverik heat calendar; printed backdrop material totaled 1500 sq ft.

Additionally, four 60 x 96-in. vinyl banner wraps were printed with the company’s EFI Vutek 5330 onto 13 oz. Ultraflex vinyl, while graphics for the distribution table were output with a ZBE Chromira 50-in. laser imager onto Kodak Endura metallic paper then laminated and mounted to Gatorboard. Installation of all the graphics was completed by the trade show staff.

Founded in 1986, Enhance a Colour has 23 employees and a 35,000-sq-ft facility. The company now offers a range of digitally printed applications and boasts a client list that includes event marketing companies, advertising agencies, retail stores, trade show organizers, and large corporations. In addition to the aforementioned printers, the company also owns an EFI Vutek 2360 and Vutek 180/600, a Durst Rho 160, a Mutoh ValueJet 1604 printer, and two Epson Stylus Pro 9800s. Enhance a Colour also has a variety of equipment and materials specifically for dye-sub applications. In addition to the Klieverik and company-built heat calendars, the company owns a heat-transfer machine for the dye-sublimation of tiles and offers several types of carpet for dye-sublimated printing.

Originally a color-separating business, Enhance a Colour extended its services to include wide-format printing in when it saw the opportunity for expansion. “One of our clients went to a trade show, and the graphics never made the show,” says O’Connor. “We were asked to handle the graphics, and the rest is history.”

ENHANCE A COLOUR
www.eacgs.com