Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY faced a temporary but undesirable problem. The museum had recently broken ground on an exterior renovation — a new sculpture garden and landscaping upgrades, recalls Sarah Dixon, president of Bluegrass State hometown Unified Sign and Design (Louisville, KY), for whom this was a return customer. Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA), working alongside local K Norman Berry Associates Architects, provided a high-resolution rendering of the future outdoor space. Unified Sign’s design team used Illustrator to set up the graphic and ONYX Thrive as the RIP. “We had the layout from day one but printed four or five rounds of test windows to show different media options and various white opacities to get the desired light-filtering result,” Dixon says. Unified Sign chose 3M Scotchcal Graphic Film IJ3650 for the window murals, imaged on the shop’s Canon Colorado M Series printer. They skipped overlaminate, as the graphics were only going up for about nine months through construction. The illusion was convincing enough to fool visitors. The lesson that would value most: find creative solutions for clients instead of just taking the order. While the client was originally thinking that an interior installation of opaque vinyl would be fine, we were able to show them other options, said a source, adding that the landing on exterior optically clear vinyl printed colour-white-colour to read cleanly from both sides. (Credit: BIG PICTURE)
Kentucky shop wraps a museum atrium in a rendering of future garden
