Chérie Morgan, principal of Morgan Design, had a vision for the new San Diego Padres Hall of Fame: 8-foot-tall displays of legendary Padres rising seamlessly, glowing, from the floor. It didn’t take the team at Artisan Colour (Scottsdale, Arizona) long to recognize that direct-to-substrate UV printing and carefully gradated white ink could turn that visualization into a reality. The shop produced a quick half-scale mockup to show the design team the kind of light interaction that could be achieved with these techniques, and before long, it was their turn to bat.
They toyed with the blend of opacity and translucence, arriving at a design that was fully opaque at the base, fading to 60-percent opaque at the top. The 13 double-sided, iconic images were printed onto ½-inch Plexiglas via Artisan’s Océ Arizona 480 XT flatbed printer. The next challenge was the aluminum extrusion frames, which had to be custom built in order to stand freely while still maintaining a low profile and concealing internal hardware for lighting. Artisan teamed with a San Diego-based engineering firm to develop the frames with the help of renderings from SketchUp 3D software. Then, the graphics had to be cut to exactly 29.187 x 92.253 inches for a perfect fit. Mike Goldner, account manager and graphic consultant, says the frame’s bolts were set in newly cast concrete foundations, meaning “it simply had to be right.”
Artisan also provided more than 60 individual Kodak Metallic photographic prints, printed via an Océ LightJet 430 photo laser printer and mounted to acrylic, for the Hall of Fame’s timeline wall, and individual slats for a leaderboard printed onto Plexiglas G P-95.
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