As exhibition season begins to ramp up, we’re continuing with our theme of printable flooring and taking a look at the options to suit your clients and your hardware.
As exhibition season begins to ramp up, we’re continuing with our theme of printable flooring and taking a look at the options to suit your clients and your hardware.
Flooring plays a pivotal role in any exhibition setting. Lighting is an important factor to consider, with high gloss surfaces reflecting lots of light due to artificial lighting, so a matt substrate to reduce unwanted glare is commonly used. Acoustics are also an important consideration, along with wayfinding, individual stand designs and practicalities. There are now materials available that sign and graphics companies can use within their existing print setup that will allow them to offer floor graphics for the exhibition industry (and beyond) without major investment in hardware.
Wayfinding is something we’ve explored extensively in some of our other blogs. The creative possibilities with wayfinding signage continue to increase as new and innovative materials are brought to market and, as an industry, we push the creative boundaries. Flooring is definitely an area that is being increasingly utilised to assist people with finding their way around exhibitions – whether it be graphics applied to the floor or becoming part of the floor itself.
One of the popular printable flooring products that we’ve seen used to great effect is Grip Floor; a self-adhesive backed PVC flooring with an anti-slip surface. Its high-tac adhesive makes it ideal for floor stickers for exhibition trails being easy to apply and having the all-important slip resistance certification, which comes from its grainy surface. You can apply Grip Floor stickers over specified carpet tiles, which are commonly used throughout the halls of exhibitions and it’s compatible with solvent, eco solvent and latex inks.
There are printable flooring products available with a more cushioned effect that can be printed and removed easily, with the capacity to re-use if cleaned and maintained properly, so feature floor graphics can be easily changed. This is an attractive proposition for your clients who may be reusing exhibition stands at several different events over a period of time. In fact, any of our flooring products that aren’t self-adhesive can be reused if cleaned, rolled and stored correctly.
Print Floor is a great example of this type of product. This cushioned lino manufactured by Endutex is superb for short-term indoor applications like exhibition stands – we’ll be using Print Floor to produce our stand floor for Sign & Digital UK this year! It’s available up to 4.95m wide and is compatible with solvent, eco solvent, UV and latex ink technology, making it a very versatile option, whatever your setup. Alternatively, available up to 4m wide and compatible with UV and latex inks, Universal Flooring is another printable lino flooring that we think works well for carpet tile drop ins.
As an alternative to vinyl based flooring, printable carpet is growing in popularity
, offering a different look and feel to exhibition walkways, entrances and stands. Our Catwalk 1 is a carpet product available up to 5m wide that gives the opportunity to think outside the box in terms of applications. Printable via dye sublimation transfer or screen printing, it can provide a plush, luxurious feel to an exhibition stand, or highlight designated areas or different levels, whilst giving a soft, homely feel. We recently saw Catwalk 1 used in the catering area at Heimtextil and the effect of a cobbled stone image was superb. Printed carpet is also useful from an acoustic perspective as it reduces the amount of echo in exhibition halls that traditionally have very high ceilings and are very noisy.
Our final little nugget is to consider the use of an anti-slip floor laminate, such as the one produced by DECAL, which protects prints onto monomeric PVC films and gives anti-slip certification making them suitable for floor graphics. This is a great way of utilising your existing self-adhesive vinyl stocks to open up new revenue streams.
If you’d like to find out more about our printable flooring products than speak to one of our knowledgeable team on 0161 7653400.
