Underground Mexican Restaurant Draws Diners with Outdoor Wall Graphic

Turner Signs used a Drytac aluminum medium specifically developed for rough surfaces.

Published

1 year ago

January 23, 2023

Adrienne Palmer Big Picture January-February 2023

I CO, A CONTEMPORARY Mexican restaurant in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England, lives underground, inside a former bank vault. Without vibrant graphics to entice hungry patrons, the brick exterior of the building remains mysterious. Enter the need for Turner Signs, a family-owned business with more than 30 years of experience in the sign industry, located in Barnsley, England. The partnership between ICO and Turner Signs is strong – the sign shop has worked with ICO’s sister restaurants on print and signage projects in the past. For this job, ICO wanted to showcase Mexican-inspired artwork that would promote the new eatery along the outdoor brick wall space. The shop used its Mimaki CJV-150 large-format solvent printer/cutter to output the design onto Drytac Polar Street FX outdoor aluminum floor and wall material, before applying the graphic to the wall space.

“The customer was absolutely blown away with the final result,” says Curt Turner, director of Turner Signs.

Perfection
The Drytac outdoor PVC-free aluminum media is suitable for outdoor floor and wall graphics, without the need for lamination, and has been specifically developed for rough ground or wall surfaces, like brick.
Partnership
“We have been working with Drytac media for about four years and know how flexible their products are for jobs like this,” says Turner.
Perception
The team at Turner Signs originally considered using printed aluminum composite board, but they changed their minds when they saw an application with Drytac Polar Street FX on the Drytac Instagram page.

Adrienne Palmer

Adrienne Palmer is the editor-in-chief of Big Picture and Screen Printing magazines. She joined Big Picture magazine in 2012 after graduating from Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism with a BA in magazine journalism. During her time with Big Picture, she has held the roles of assistant editor, associate editor, and managing editor; she added sister publication Screen Printing magazine to her resume in 2019. She is a 2019 Folio: Top Woman in Media; spearheads Big Picture's annual Women in Wide Format Awards and Best of Wide Format Awards as well as Screen Printing's annual Women in Screen Printing Awards; is on the board of Printing United Alliance's Women in Print Alliance and the U.N.I.T.E. Together diversity and inclusion program; hosts the Screen Saver podcast; and represents the Big Picture and Screen Printing teams at numerous industry events year-round as a speaker, moderator, and panelist.

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