Wide format printing produces Soft Signage & Wall coverings

Soft signage or creative wall coverings you can have them all. Wide format printing has made it all possible. Only now are material manufactures catching up to the digital printers that have become part of our arsenal of printing equipment. If it can not be Screen printed, large format is the next option. Printing of Banners, Fabrics, Canvas, Wall coverings & Repositionable Materials in full colour reel to reel or in large or irregular shape panels creates no problem for our large format printers.

Wall coverings can have individual design in stead of standard design. What an opening for interior designers, or switched on painter & decorators. This is an opportunity to supply a unique printed package. This printed media can spill over in to areas like DIY experts, shop fitting  & Exhibition stand builders who can now offer personalised wallpaper that is fundamentally easy to use. With PVC free digital nonwoven wallpapers from ERFURT, it is now possible to approach wall design with wallpapers from a purely creative standpoint, free any environmental concerns. ERFURT Digital nonwoven is hot roll pressed from pure non woven material which hugely increases the durability of it surface. The wall covering printed in vibrant full colour looks stunning. Can be hung using conventional nonwoven adhesive, either by the wall pasting technique or with a pasting machine. Smooth, textured and adhesive backed papers are available When it comes to redecorating ERFURT Digital nonwoven can be simply stripped dry from the wall.

The soft signage revolution is gathering pace and we offer a range of printed materials with a unique look and feel. Large stunning graphics or small logo repeats can produce exciting interiors and fabric displays. Your vision is the limit our printing and finishing is the start.

Repro Arts leading wide format printers and finishers http://www.reproarts.co.uk

Repro Arts in 3 minutes

Have you ever wondered exactly what goes on in the time between your enquiry about a print order and the day it arrives on your doorstep?

Once you have made your decision to use Repro Arts’ services, your print order will be handled on the latest printers’ management information system, from initial enquiry to quotation to confirmation of order. You can then see a PDF proof of your product before the printing process begins. You can see some of the stunning artwork we have produced in the past in our new video (Repro Arts in 3 minutes, made by Daniel Spencer of Fierce Bad Rabbit). These have been either digital or screen printed and finished in-house, just like all of the products we print.

Once your design has been finalised, we’ll print it for you using either our digital or screen printing machines. Always using the latest digital technology, such as the Fujifilm Acuity Advance X2 flat bed printer, we can produce products 3.05m by infinity, or the reel to reel wide format digital printer which can print anything up to 2.5m wide by infinity! These machines can print direct to sheets in CMYK full colour, are capable of edge-to-edge printing and can even print in white on to clear or black materials.

Our screen printing process uses sheet fed print lines and can be any size up to 1.6m by 1.4m and use UV Cure inks. The machines are capable of printing any amount of colours onto any sheet material.

Once the printing is complete, your product can be cut to any shape you choose. The Zund flat bed cutting table (seen in action in the 3 minute video) can cut flat sheets or reel to reel and is capable of any size up to 2.5m by infinity! Whether you’ve ordered one product or a thousand, we can provide profile cutting, radius corners or even a three-dimensional shape on a wide range of materials including paper, Correx, Foamex, acrylic and more.

Once your product has been printed, cut and finished by our team of experts, you will be sent an email as soon as it is dispatched and it will be sent directly to your door, wherever you are in the country, via UPS. You can even track your order’s whereabouts on their website.

You can find out all about our printing process and see some completed products and our machines in action in our Repro Arts in 3 minutes video, now showing on our homepage!

Secret Norwich

We’re all familiar with the marketplace in Norwich, we’ve been shopping in Chapelfield and the Castle Mall and sat in the sun in Chapelfield Gardens. Many of us have wandered around the Lanes and peeped into the boutiques and coffee shops tucked away there. But have you paid a visit to Dragon Hall or investigated the enchanting Riverside Walk?

Riverside Walk
The Riverside Walk runs alongside the River Wensum close to the railway station. The two-mile walk leading from Cathedral Close wouldn’t be out of place in the depths of the countryside and is a real escape from the hustle and bustle of the city centre. Along the way you’ll come across Pulls Ferry, a 15^th century arch named after a ferryman who worked there. It was once a water gate over a canal which was used by the Normans to ferry stone from France along the Rivers Wensum and Yare to get as close to the construction site as possible.
Another famous structure along the walk is Cow Tower, a medieval brick defensive tower built in 1398-9 at a strategic bend in the river as part of the city defences. The water meadow which it stands on was once known as Cowholme, and it is from this that the tower gets its name. The 14^th century tower is a rare example of a freestanding medieval artillery tower, and, although appearing to be almost complete, it was damaged severely in the rebellion led by Robert Kett in 1549.

 Cow Tower                                                                                                     Pulls Ferry

 

Elm Hill
Elm Hill runs between Princes Street and Wensum Street and is one of the oldest streets in Norwich. There are a number of Tudor houses still standing which were built after over 700 houses in the city were destroyed in the great fire of 1507 – in fact, there are more original Tudor houses standing in Elm Hill than in the whole City of London! The cobbled street is now home to a number of independent shops (such as the Dormouse Bookshop and The Bear Shop), as well as the Briton’s Arms coffee house and the Stranger’s Club. It is also a popular destination for film and television crews and was notably featured in the 2007 film Stardust when it was transformed into the streets of Stormhold.

Elm Hill

Dragon Hall
Dragon Hall is a medieval hall hidden away on King Street, close to the river. It can be accessed easily via the new bridge on Riverside. The hall gets its name from the intricate dragon carving on one of the spandrels (triangular spaces between the beams and the braces) in the Great Hall. The Hall was built in about 1430 and is the only surviving medieval trading hall in Western Europe that was built by an individual. Robert Toppes owned the site in the 15^th century, when the great trading hall was built, but after his death in 1467 it was divided up and sold. During the 19^th century Dragon Hall housed pubs, shops and businesses. But in the early part of the 20^th century, the hall and the surrounding area became neglected and it was in danger of becoming derelict. It was eventually bought and restored by the City Council in the 1970s and is now a Grade 1 listed building. The architecture is now complemented by displays showing the role the Hall has played in the history of the city.

Dragon Hall                                                                                              The Great Hall

 

Stranger’s Hall
Stranger’s Hall is one of the oldest buildings in Norwich. Situated on Charing Cross, it was once a merchant’s house and now is home to a museum of English domestic life. The hall dates back to the early 14^th century when it was likely built for a merchant named Ralph de Middilton. The house stood well back from the street, and the upper storey originally ran at right-angles to the street following the line of the undercroft (vaulted cellar)  that it was built above. William Barley rebuilt the hall in around 1450, turning it round so that it ran parallel to the street. Until Nicholas Sotherton, wealthy merchant grocer and Mayor of Norwich, built the present front door, porch and steps in the 1530s, the living quarters could only be reached through a passageway and narrow staircase at the back of the undercroft. The hall staircase and window were added in 1627 by Francis Cock, a grocer who lived in the Hall from 1612 to 1628 and who also became Mayor of the city. The Hall was bought by Joseph Paine, a Norwich hosier, in 1659. As Mayor, in 1660 he went to London to present King Charles II with one thousand pounds in gold from the citizens of Norwich, and was rewarded with a knighthood. By the end of the 19^th century the hall was standing neglected and almost derelict. It was almost demolished, but was saved by Leonard Bolingbroke, a local solicitor and for many years treasurer of the Norfolk Archaeological Society who bought the house in 1899. His family had been silk mercers, and he was the grandson of James Stark, the Norwich School artist. He was an enthusiastic collector, and furnished the house with his own collection of antiques. He appointed a caretaker and in May 1900 he opened it to the public as a folk museum, one of the first of its kind in Britain. Bolingbroke wanted to display objects used in everyday life as an alternative to the stuffed birds and fossils on show in most museums at that time. When the museum failed to pay its way Bolingbroke moved in with his wife and family of five children. He continued to admit the public to some rooms and in 1922 presented Strangers’ Hall and its contents to the City of Norwich as a museum of domestic life.
The museum now has one of the largest domestic life collections in the country, with different rooms depicting different eras, including a Regency music room, an Edwardian dining room and a room made entirely from paper.

Stranger’s Hall                                                                             The Regency music room

The Bridewell Museum
The Bridewell Museum (although currently closed for refurbishment) is tucked away in Bridewell Alley and is dedicated to the local life and industry in days gone by and the fashions that Norwich was once famous for.
Originally a house built by Geoffery de Salle in about 1325 and enlarged in 1386 by William Appleyard (both of whom were wealthy merchants), the house was bought by the city authorities in 1538. Part of it was made into  a workhouse to correct and punish the city’s vagrant population, known as a ‘Brydewell’. The first of these workhouses was near St. Bride’s well in London, and the name ‘Bridewell’ came to be used for similar places elsewhere in the country. Most of the building was destroyed by fire in 1751, but it was rebuilt and remained in use as a prison. The courtyard was used as an exercise yard, and the initials and dates carved by prisoners can still be seen in the left hand corner of the yard, just past the museum entrance.
After the inmates were transferred to a new prison in 1828, the building was bought by James Newbegin and turned into a tobacco factory, before it became Lilley & Skinner’s leather warehouse in about 1890, and then Thomas Bowhill’s boot and shoe factory in about 1896.
After the factory moved to Heigham Street in 1923, Henry Nicholas Holmes, another shoe manufacturer, purchased the building and set about making it into a museum of local industries. It was opened by the Duke of York on 24th October 1925. Today, there are displays featuring the Norwich food industry, iron foundries and examples of early fire appliances, as well as a collection of shoes all manufactured in Norwich. There is also a recreation of a 1930′s pharmacy, one of the most complete examples in the country.

The Bridewell Museum

The Adam & Eve pub
There are records of the existence of the Adam & Eve pub which date all the way back to 1249, when workmen building the Cathedral would come to the inn to be paid for their labours in bread and beer. The building was owned by monks who also gave ale to the patients at the Great Hospital for medicinal purposes. The pub is said to be haunted by the ghost of Lord Sheffield who was killed nearby during Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, as well as by spectres of some of the monks who lived and worked there.
The notorious murderer James Rush is reputed to have plotted his crime in the Adam & Eve. In 1849, thousands watched him hang for the murders of Isaac Jeremy, recorder of Norwich, and his son. In the mid-19^th century, the pub was frequented by the Norfolk author George Borrow, best known for his novels Lavengro and Romany Rye. Between 1845 and 1860, the landlady of the pub was a Mrs Howes. She had a wherry of the same name and famously transported sand from Great Yarmouth which she sold to local pubs for their floors and spittoons. She became very popular from this trade – it was not unknown for contraband items to be concealed in the sacks along with the sand!

The Adam & Eve

Pictures all from http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk.

Design your own posters and banners!

As you may well be aware, our website has undergone a big revamp since last year, and we’ve got a few new pages to go with our new look! We’ve mentioned the Exhibition Design Tool and all of the great green products now available to print on in previous posts, but we’ve got a few more exciting new features to share too!

Firstly, we’re working on building a Knowledge Base where you can find out all sorts of things like paper sizes (exactly how big is A0?), optimum viewing distances and standard poster measurements.

Secondly, we’re offering a new service where you can design your very own poster or banner and we’ll print it for you in glorious technicolour!
Get a giant 600mm x 1200mm poster for £24.95 or a 1m x 4.5m banner for £49.95.
All you need to do is create your design using PhotoShop or similar (or a good online photo editor such as Pixlr), save it as a PDF file* and then upload it to our website. Use the PayPal buttons to place your order and tell us how many posters or banners you need, then enter your payment information and the rest is up to us! Postage is £6.50 per order, not per item, and your order will be dispatched in 3-5 working days. You can include whatever you like – photos, drawings, text, anything! Maybe someone special has a birthday coming up – design a banner with their picture on it and your own personalised message. Or maybe you want your best photography work printed to giant proportions and displayed for all to see! Whether it’s just for one special event or it’s going to become a permanent feature, head over to Repro Arts and let us turn your design into a larger-than-life poster!

In order for your poster or banner to look great, you’ll need to make sure your image resolution is high enough so that when it’s enlarged the quality doesn’t get compromised. The standard minimum resolution for print is 300 dpi, meaning 300 dots (or pixels) per inch. You can enlarge printed photos by scanning them into your computer at a resolution of 300dpi or above. Images downloaded from the internet will generally have a resolution of 72 dpi, and therefore won’t look great when enlarged. It’s not possible to open an image with a low dpi in PhotoShop (or similar) and increase the resolution – it just won’t look very good when printed.

You’ll also need to make sure that your design is proportional so it won’t be distorted when enlarged. There’s no need to try and design it at full size; as long as it’s one-third the size of the finished product then we can enlarge it for you.

Go on – design your poster or banner now!

*Converting your files to PDF: some photo editing software will allow you to save directly as a .pdf file, however, if yours doesn’t, you can use a free online converter such as CutePDF to do it for you.

      

It’s time to go green

It’s becoming ever more important to think carefully about what impact your actions are having on the environment. We all know the damage that can be done if we don’t take care of our planet, and now with recycling creating jobs, boosting the economy and proving cheaper than landfill, waste collection and incineration there are more reasons than ever to cut waste and go green.

At Repro Arts we’ve been thinking about what we can do to reduce our impact on the environment. We’ve introduced a number of environmentally-friendly print products including BioBoard (an environmentally sound substrate specifically designed for the printing industry), Reboard (a lightweight, strong and versatile paper-based board with a unique fluted core), Dufaylite Ultra Board (a 100% recycled-paper board made with Dufaylite’s honeycomb structure which can be recycled again using traditional means) , DuPont Imvelo (a substrate made from 100% polypropylene which is recyclable wherever facilities for recycling flexible polypropylene products exist) and BioMedia products (completely recyclable, biodegradable replacements for traditional PVC substrates).

What can you do to be greener?

• Send e-cards instead of traditional paper ones.
• Recycle your old clothes or give them to a charity shop instead of throwing them away. Even things that can’t be saved are worth donating – many charity shops will send clothes, shoes and toys that cannot be sold again for recycling.
• Take your own carrier bags to the supermarket instead of building a collection of plastic ones.
• Recycle your empty inkjet cartridges – many companies will send a bag for recycling them when you order a new cartridge. Buying remanufactured cartridges is also better for the environment and is cheaper too.
• Recycle or sell your old mobile phone to stop it from ending up in landfill.
• Make your own lunch instead of buying it (saving packaging and money!) and take it to work in a reusable plastic container rather than a sandwich bag.
• Give old spectacles to charity shops or high-street opticians to be donated across the world.

Read even more tips on how to reduce waste on the Friends of the Earth website.

What actions is your company taking to cut down on waste?

3D Exhibition Design – ‘try before you buy’ for the digital age

Ever wanted to know exactly what something will look like before you order it? Will my company logo look striking on that display stand? Will my exhibit catch the customer’s eye? Well, wonder no longer! Thanks to the 3D Standards Exhibition Design Tool, you can see just what your exhibition display will look like before you order it! Take a look at their clever application (also found on our website), choose your stand, poster, kiosk, banner, podium, booth… then upload your artwork and start experimenting! You can even choose the floor area, whether your exhibit will be inside or out, add fire alarms and first aid points, populate your area with figures and furniture and hang curtains and fixtures. And, of course, you can view your display in 3D from every angle!

Once you’ve finished your creation, you can save it and show our team exactly what you want your exhibit to look like, so we can get it just right for you every time. Or, if you prefer, we can make up the virtual design for you and let you see our vision of your display before printing begins.

Why not have a look at the 3D Exhibition Design Tool or head over to Repro Arts now and have some fun seeing how amazing your stand could look at your next exhibition?

An example of what you can do!

QR codes – what are they all about?

You’re bound to have seen them around – those little black-and-white pixelated squares that seem to be cropping up more and more often lately. But just what are they? QR codes, or mobile tags, is the answer. A QR (that’s Quick Response) code is like a barcode that can be read by applications on certain mobiles and smartphones that, when scanned, will take you directly to a mobile version of a website (you can try it for yourself here).

The codes were created in Japan and are now becoming very popular in Europe too. When scanned by a reader (easily downloaded onto iPhones and Android devices and often pre-installed on many mobile platforms), the codes can lead to a mobile website, location information, a voucher code or special offer, contact details or even a trailer for a film. They can carry several hundreds of times the amount of data carried by ordinary barcodes thanks to their ability to be read in both horizontal and vertical directions.

QR codes can now be found on t-shirts, posters, business cards, the sides of buildings (see the skyscraper in Tokyo that has been turned into a giant QR code) and have even started to be used as artwork. They are being used more frequently in the gaming world, where players of the PlayStation 3 game Little Big Planet 2 can generate and print a code for every level in the game, and hold the code up to the PlayStation Eye camera to be taken directly to that level. The Nintendo 3DS Mii Maker application can generate a code for any Mii so that it can be published or shared on the internet, and the game Defense Grid: The Awakening (used in the Portal 2 ARG campaign) even has a level shaped like a QR code.

Any business can take advantage of the new technology and show off their tech knowledge through the use of a QR code. Add them to your posters, business cards and promotional material and give customers quick access to product details, contact information and special offers. The codes can be easily generated using sites such as Kaywa, and it’s even possible to add a logo into the code (provided your code has a high enough error correction margin).

Sources: Wikipedia, QRCode.com, Search Engine Land, EasyKey, Mashable

Scan the code to go directly to the Repro Arts mobile website

Toppled wall reveals 30-year-old advertising

Recent high winds that caused a wall to crumble in Norwich have revealed advertising for Repro Arts put up thirty years ago. The print shows the vivid colours and logo used by the company in the 1980s. Although time has moved on and the logo and address have changed, the Fascal white 400 vinyl printed in Sericol inks have stood the test of time. The self-adhesive panels were part of an advertising campaign in the 1970s to promote the sign service offered by Repro Arts, who at the time were well-known for their screen printing expertise in producing all types of point of sale.

At the time the panels were printed for use as add-ons to taxi door panels. Norwich City Council offered a tender for use of advertising space on a fleet of six aluminium-body vehicles operated by the Council. Repro Arts won the tender and it was decided that the opportunity would be used to promote their sign service.  The ads printed for the taxi campaign were linked together with the use of blue reflective Fascal and hand-cut white vinyl text – a new concept. Today this would be an everyday job, but this was cutting-edge technology 40 years ago – how times have changed!

Now the industry has moved on to computer generated text and full-colour digital printing onto self-adhesive vinyl – a full vehicle wrap in vivid colours may look a lot more impressive, but will it have the longevity of screen print?

Vintage advertising behind the wall

Screen printing techniques really stand the test of time!

Welcome!

Thanks for visiting the brand new Repro Arts News blog! Look out for interesting articles, details of promotions and local industry news – straight from our press to yours!

We’d love it if you’d like to take a look at our revitalised website featuring more product information than you can imagine, a gallery of photos and videos, posters to buy and even some exciting links to other places on the web – and lots more!
You can also connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

See you soon!