MADISON SQUARE GARDEN is one block away but that didn’t matter. The artwork came late again. Designers have that trait. This was a big job with a tight deadline. There is a walkway bridge that leads from Penn Station to MSG and we will fill 14 blocked out panels on the wall with players from the New York Rangers. They wanted it printed, laminated, mounted and installed before their opening home day game on Thursday Oct. 4.
THE PANELS are huge: 56.75″ wide by 105.5″ tall. Theres also a smaller blocked off panel underneath: 56.75″x31.75″. Fourteen of them.
GRUNGE DESIGN is in. And it won’t go away. Grunge is distressed type and irregular splotches and splatters. It is everywhere, TV, billboards, magazines but it works. And it works really well with hockey. We didnt need to go over and do a survey to double check the measurments. We have done this job before. At first I didn’t like this years design, but the more I worked with it, the more I liked it. Simple design wins…..every single time.
IT WAS ADOBE INDESIGN documents with placed Photoshop files. At 1/4 scale everything lookks great. But a sectional test print at 100% threw a large wrench into production. And as sure as the the sky is blue the images were way too small in resolution for something as monsterous as 105 inches by 56 inches. The thing about this is: THE DESIGNER DOESNT CARE-we have to make it work. By doubling resolution in the image size window (in Photoshop) we came away with a final resolution of under 40 dpi (dot per inch). Although this doesnt sound good it works in large format because our RIP processes a final rasterized image that can print correctly without pixalated edges.
THE HP DESIGNJET 9000 (shown above) can make an image with a final res of 40 dpi look like it is 600 dpi!
THE RANGERS are all about the color blue. Madison Square Garden made it clear that with glossy lamination they wanted blue. We sent them proofs which they rejected as being “too purple” This happens alot with rich blues. By taking out a little magenta on the RIP-we finally got a nice solid blue. We hurridly sent them proofs because time was running out. Each panel would take over an hour to print and there were 14 of them!
MSG signed off on the proofs! I worked a continuous shift until 6am to get a solid jump on the printing.
