Pennsylvania Print Pro’s Favorite Hobby of All? It’s Printing.

Roger Allen
Executive Director, Fresh Artists, Kids Who Print

From a young age, Roger Allen always has been in the design field. He’s been an artist since he was a small child; building, making, and designing projects of all kinds. It drives everything he does, he says.

But for the past two decades, he has been helping others bring art to the world through wide-format digital printing and it has been his passion. “I’m designing and making things less for myself and am more into helping others bring their ideas and hard work to fruition,” he says. “I got into wide-format printing about 20 years ago while working at a small printing shop and fell in love with the technology and seeing how it’s changed over the years.”

Along with his mother, Barbara Chandler Allen, the two invented a ground-breaking plan to save art education in underfunded public schools by founding Fresh Artists, an award-winning, national nonprofit corporate art program that blows up K-12 kids’ artwork for Fortune 100’s corporate interiors.

A self-proclaimed workaholic whose “mind is always thinking of the next great installation,” Allen does find time to balance his work/life challenge. He is the proud owner of four beloved dogs, and enjoys hiking, camping, canoeing, and woodworking. But playing with printing equipment is his biggest hobby. “I think, ‘What is something someone said couldn’t be done on the printer?’ I figure out how to do that. It’s such a wonderful hobby because there’s so many avenues you can go with it. You connect just about anything with printing, and it’s cool.”