Music Education Company’s Trade Show Display is a Guitar Fit for a Giant

Jax Signs creates a larger-than-life guitar display booth.

PRINT SHOP: Jax Signs – a Dataflow Company | jax-signs.com
LOCATION: Endicott, New York
TOOLS AND SUPPLIES: Canon Colorado Series printer, Roland press, Duratex 13oz Banner material, 3M Controltac Graphic Film IJ180, Sign·Foam, aluminum composite material (ACM), aluminum tubing, vinyl material, bungee cord, Ackland banner system, motorized slider

WHEN IT COMES to tradeshow displays, Card Chords says bigger is better. The company envisioned a giant display highlighting their product: a card placed between a guitar’s fretboard and strings to show beginner players where to place their fingers to play a certain chord. Card Chords reached out to Jax Signs – a Dataflow Company out of Endicott, New York, to fabricate their colossal display. The star of the show? An oversized guitar neck with LED backlighting and front illumination.

Jax Signs began designing a dynamic display to the customer’s specifications: an 11-foot guitar, 8 x 10-foot background, and giant moving Chord Card inside the strings. Oh, and the display had to be able to break down into a shippable crate and reassembled for multiple shows. In other words, a puzzle only an experienced print shop could solve.

The Jax Sign team engineered the display with lightweight, structurally stable materials that lend themselves to years of set up and teardown. The event graphics featured a fabricated Sign·Foam guitar neck with 3M Controltac Graphic Film IJ180 graphics, Duratex 13oz Banner material backdrop with Ackland banner system, and a motorized slider to move a Card Chord replica back and forth under bungee cord guitar strings. Additional substrates included aluminum composite material (ACM), aluminum tubing, and vinyl material; graphics were output on Canon Colorado Series and Roland presses.

“The impact of the display would have been minimized without the vibrant print behind the oversized product pieces. The prints on the guitar neck and moving Card Chord could not have been more realistic and truly helped them showcase their product from a distance,” says Clarissa Reyna-Aboytes, marketing manager at Dataflow. “It took quite a bit more time than we anticipated to build but it was a very unique, satisfying, and rewarding project in the end.”

Kelsey Johnson

Kelsey Johnson joined the Big Picture and Screen Printing teams as assistant editor in January 2017 after graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University. She is based out of Cincinnati and spends her free time exploring local coffee shops and driving all over the Midwest attending concerts.