Earlier this year, the alumni association for the University of Notre Dame near South Bend, Ind., commissioned a large-scale floating Mother’s Day graphic display for the school’s Hesburgh Reflecting Pool.
Agio Imaging created the 12.5 x 15.2-m (41 x 50-ft) display, which integrated the university’s ‘ND’ logo within a heart shape, using Adobe’s Creative Suite software and white panels of 3A Composites’ Gatorplast extruded polystyrene (XPS) foam board, supplied by distributor Laird Plastics. The 25-mm (1-in.) thick 1.2 x 2.4-m (4 x 8-ft) Gatorplast panels were direct-printed with a daisy flower pattern, using a super-wide-format ultraviolet-curing (UV-curing) digital printer, then cut to shape on a computer numerical control (CNC) router.
The resulting 24 heart display pieces were attached to each other with custom-milled Dibond aluminum composite material (ACM) plates and screws engineered by Agio’s own production team. To create the illusion of a free-floating display, the company used black sandbags and clear nylon lines as invisible anchors.
The logo, too, was direct-printed onto and CNC-routed from 1.2 x 2.4-m (4 x 8-ft) Gatorplast sheets, yielding 28 pieces that were installed on-site with the custom plates and screws. Agio had float-tested a sheet of the 3A material in a tub of water for five days to ensure its closed-cell structure could withstand prolonged display in the reflecting pool.
The graphics were installed in advance of Mother’s Day for a special campus event on April 29, where students and other attendees were invited to float 3,000 daisies within the heart-shaped display.
“The challenge was to engineer and fabricate a display that was structurally sound enough to float atop the pool and remain in place as the flowers were dropped in,” says Davina Logan, director of sales and marketing for Agio. “The special event designer at the university was very pleased with the outcome—so much so that their team is already thinking about next year’s event.”
The university and its alumni association have a special connection to Mother’s Day, as an early classroom assignment requiring students to write to their mothers inspired alumnus Frank Hering to lobby for a nationwide holiday. The effort was successful in 1914, when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed Mother’s Day into effect.
