Procedes Chenel Art Exhibit

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to see incredible examples at a presentation of paper architecture. Now what ever comes to your mind when you hear paper architecture is about to change once you see the amazing examples below.

I meet Sophie Chenel, General Manager of the family business Procedes Chenel International.  The International business has been helping designers since 1896 with worldwide development, production and distribution of decorative solutions, technologies and materials.

Bonjour de Lansargues!

Bonjour! I have arrived safely in France and had the chance to experience quite a bit already in just three days. Upon arrival in Paris I had the wonderful experience of a 3-hour train ride through the southern France countryside all the way to Montpellier where I was greeted by a colleague of mine from Duo Display. From there we went through the town of Montpellier on our way to Lansargues.
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You can’t just sit at your desk

As workloads increase it is hard to remember to get away from your desk, to walk around the office and see what is going on. I have this issue from time to time. Luckily I was able to get really far away last week and go to Global Shop.
Read about my experience here.

While at Global Shop, I noticed a lot of the same type of graphics and systems there that we produce in our own shop every day. I was surprised because I did not expect to see so many products we produce directed to the retail industry. This made me wonder what else I was missing. So, right then, I decided at least once daily to check out what is going on at our shop. Right away I learned something.

Global Shop 2013

I was lucky enough to experience Global Shop in Chicago this year. Since it was a day trip from where I am in St. Louis I also experienced the world at 4 am. It was very dark and my eyes did not quite work right away.

Global Shop was held at the McCormick Place in Chicago. That gritty and busy city is one of my favorites. It was raining and windy and great! It was a packed show and McCormick Place was a great venue. You could actually see from one end of the show to the other but that was misleading. It is a big show with much to see, from shopping carts to cardboard furniture. Yeah, I typed cardboard furniture. I will mention more in a bit.
I was surprised to see:

Musings on Exhibitor

Being asked to be a guest blogger on Optima’s blog is very similar to being asked to be a guest host for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. And a post ExhibitorShow re-cap is always an easy topic!

As a card carrying member of the “Never Missed an ExhibitorShow” fraternity, I can say that 2013 was officially one for the ages. Attendance was great – both end-users and industry people. The number of exhibitors was up. But more importantly, everyone was pleased with the entire experience. The industry seems to be at an all-time high.

There were several cool things I saw at the show. I thought the Classic Exhibits booth was very well done (I can say that as a Classic employee, though I had nothing to do with the design at all). Optima made a huge splash with their 20×30 and its interesting approach to the new technology world. Lighting ideas were everywhere. I think the two “coolest” things yet were the video wall from MG Design and the Crayon wall created by Derse. Each company took a different approach; however, they both hit home runs and both left an impression on a guy who has seen a lot of cool stuff in this industry over 25 years.

Everybody is a story teller

I recently attended the EDPA roadshow series in Chicago and listened to a fantastic presentation by Brenda Cowan from Fashion Institute of Technology. My assessment of her presentation and subsequent Q&A is that not only is every one a story teller, but we all have to routinely flex the ole grey matter when it comes to asking questions to create our stories. By asking obvious and not so obvious questions, you gather the building blocks for your story. Big details, small details, macro ideas, micro ideas can all come from a session of spit balling questions with your audience. It was obvious that Brenda is an educator and did a fantastic job of posing a question to the audience and as responses came at her, she did not stop to dwell, but asked, “what else, good what else?”. She got the early adopters in the audience to contribute and then got the middle part of he bus to chime in as well. I had never listened to one of her presentations before and must say that I was very impressed.

Processing Color

A few weeks back our color dude posted some great tidbits regarding ‘color’ and gave some good tips on being able to hit the end-user’s desired color. One tidbit that Quinten touched on briefly was supplied samples. This made me think about a few of my favorite sample-matching situations and how simple communication plays a role in success or failure. For sake of reading, here are my two favorites.

Legal pad yellow
Client calls and says I am doing a job for a law firm and wants the background of their signs to look like legal pad yellow and were told ‘no problem-we can do it.’ Optima’s customer gave their designer the task of designing the graphics and ‘matching’ legal pad yellow.

Another Great Panoramic Solution

Have you considered Panoramic as your rental stock? Panoramic is a great Rental solution for any large wall or room! Panoramic provides a simple all graphic image just perfect for repetitive rental opportunities.

As you can see in the photos in this case-study, Optima’s customer purchased the Panoramic and rented it to their client for a show. It consisted of two walls. One 16′ tall by 50′ long and the other 16′ tall by 70′ long along with a 10′ by 12′ room.

That same client has two additional shows coming up,

How Often

I have been in the graphics business for a couple of years (21 to be boastful) and there are a few tried and true comments that I have heard from customers regardless of changes in technology.

One in particular that surfaces every few months is “I like working with the guy down the street as I can go look at proofs in their office”. I have had numerous discussions here and I am going to save my editorial comments and simply ask the question…

Not Good, but Great!

I got into the office a little early today and got to catch up with one of our third shift managers, Tracy Doner. Tracy oversees our third shift Digital Imaging group (the folks that prep and direct production ready files to the various output devices) and some of you might remember her from her days working in Tech Support. She made a comment that struck me as very beneficial for customers. She said that she was happy to see the use of HD Dye-sub for pillow case jobs compared to 4 Color Colossus because the file prep and processing time can be less and specifically, it is easier to proof thus saving her group time and reducing the number of reproofs. The time saving on the front end is a nice benefit for Optima(not the point of this blog), but increased perfection and efficiency is of real benefit to our customers.