Send vector where you can
Logos and type as vector artwork scale to a back board without softening. A screengrab from a slide deck will not, however good it looks on the slide.
Getting Artwork Ready
The branding page covers what we can brand and what it costs. This one is about getting your artwork through the process without a reprint.
What branding physically is
It helps to know what you are designing for. Branding here means printed vinyl transfers, cut to the panels of a specific machine, applied before the unit leaves us and removed when it comes back. It is not a permanent respray and it is not a printed backdrop hung behind something.
That has two consequences for your designer. Each panel is a fixed shape dictated by the machine rather than a canvas you choose, and the artwork has to survive being looked at from about two feet away by somebody waiting for a go.
Six things to get right before you send it
Most reprints we see come from one of these.
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Mind the resolution on photography
Panels are large-format. An image that is fine on a website will show its pixels at a metre wide, and there is no fixing that at print stage.
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Keep detail away from the edges
Panels wrap edges and meet corners. Anything critical - a logo, a strapline, a URL - needs breathing room from the trim, or it ends up bending round a corner.
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Give us the brand colours as values
Send the actual references rather than asking us to match a JPEG. Printed vinyl and a backlit screen are different animals and the reference is what keeps them close.
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Design for two feet and twenty feet
The person playing sees it close up. The person deciding whether to walk over sees it across an aisle. If the message only works at one of those distances, it is only doing half a job.
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Get sign-off before the proof, not after
The slowest part of this is almost never us. It is a marketing approval that lands after the print deadline.
How the process runs
You send artwork. Our design team lays it up on the templates for the actual unit and comes back with a visual for sign-off. You approve it or mark it up. It goes to large-format print in-house, gets applied to the machine, and the branded unit is delivered and set up by our own team.
Because we own the equipment, there is no third party in the middle holding the measurements. That is the practical reason a change late in the day is often possible here and often isn't elsewhere.
Lead times
When to send it
Bare kit can move quickly. Branded kit cannot move quicker than design, approval, print and application allow, and the approval step is the one that slips.
As a rule, get the artwork to us as early in the booking as you can manage, and treat your own internal sign-off as the real deadline rather than our print date. If you are running a roadshow with different artwork per leg, say so at the start, because we can build the schedule around the changeovers instead of reacting to them.
If the date is tight, tell us honestly how tight. There is usually something we can do, and it is a much better conversation to have at quote stage than the week before.
Choosing what to brand
You do not have to wrap everything. On a lot of stands the highest-value surfaces are the header, because it is what reads across the hall, and the leaderboard, because it is what people photograph. A Magnetic Topgear Score Leader Board is £69 to hire and branding it is one of the cheapest ways to get your name into every picture somebody takes of the queue.
Branding starts at £49 plus VAT and is priced by unit and surface area, so a Batak back panel is £99 while the twelve buttons are £49. Where the budget is tight, one well-chosen surface beats four half-hearted ones.
For what this looks like in practice on a campaign, product launch games goes through the mechanics, and trade show games covers the stand side.