“They have really taken off in the past year or two,” she says. “They’re more expensive than vinyl backlit graphics, but they really grab attention. Some buildings are using backlit fabric units in their lobbies, featuring landscape paintings, abstract artwork or other interior-design visuals to complement the architecture.”
Indeed, a wide range of lightweight, portable tensioning structures, often with aluminum tubing for frames, can be used to display fabric graphics. These may include flat or concave walls, canopies, podiums and shelving units, allowing fabrics to be integrated into practical structures. Others are display stands unto themselves, including tabletop graphic mounts, flag stands, wall-mountable frames, hanging structures, fabric lightboxes, rollup banner stands and pop-up fabric stretchers in various configurations. Exhibit designers’ creativity has also yielded many customized configurations.
Most retailers are installing fabric graphics the same way as vinyl graphics.
Bigger and better
Accordingly, sign structures are being customized for fabric graphics. Aluminum extrusion manufacturer Comhan, by way of example, recently expanded from the Netherlands into the North American market with a 929-m2 (10,000-sf) facility in Fergus, Ont. While it currently stocks inventory from Europe, there are plans to start manufacturing locally as demand grows.
“Fabric graphics are huge in Europe, but now Canadian and American signmakers are also moving into larger-format textile printing for both indoor and outdoor graphics,” says Theo Stork, manager of Comhan Canada. “We’re supplying extrusions to printing companies in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec and they cut them to the sizes they need.”
Like Cheelo, Comhan has identified a trend in mounting fabric graphics to lightboxes, whereby sign shops and their customers benefit from the low weight of the materials.
“You can now make a 3 x 3-m (10 x 10-ft) light box for double-sided fabric signage, for example, and there’s no need for supports,” Stork says. “Compare that to a vinyl lightbox, where the widest possible size is about to 2.4 to 2.7 m (8 to 9 ft) and you need to add acrylic for support, which means a lot more money and a lot more work. It’s also easier now to pre-make a lightbox for your customer. You just print, roll and ship the fabric graphics with an LED kit and they can install it on-site. The LEDs can even be powered with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection.”
Stork cites the capacity for larger sizes as one of the most significant benefits of fabrics over more traditional media. Swathes can be run through a 4.9-m (16-ft) wide printer and then sewn together to create building-size graphics.
“We’re seeing stretch systems installed during building renovations,” he says. “You have a see-through fabric for people working in the building, but from the outside, passersby see an image of the whole building as it will appear after the work is finished. And it’s not too expensive for the property developers to do. We’re even getting orders for 3 to 4 km (1.9 to 2.5 mi) of extrusions!”
To make such projects possible, not only have special textiles been developed for large-scale outdoor graphic applications, but spray-on coatings have also been formulated to protect the inkjet-printed images against fading under the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays.
“While most large-format fabric graphics are being installed at stores and stadiums, where they will only be up for a couple of years at most, two coats of these spray-on products will keep UV rays out for 10 years,” says Stork. “They also prevent graffiti from sticking. So, you’ll see more of these graphics on apartment buildings, hotels, highway barriers, museums, etc.”
