Hospitality is where one can find the most bold design concepts for window shade graphics—whether in hotel lobbies, spas, or restaurants.
to grasp. “One thing we’ve done is produce a library of designs [clients] can choose from,” he says. “This helps get them thinking in the right direction.” Still Williams enjoys working with customers from scratch. To come up with design placement, he uses a simple worksheet showing where the images should be placed in the middle or how far left or right or from the bottom the customer wants it. A designer recently came to his shop with a project involving an interesting pattern on some drapery fabric that she wanted for shades. “I took a photograph of it on my iPhone, redesigned it, and made a few changes to render that image onto a shade,” he says. Williams has also been working with a non-profit historical museum in Houston for the past year on an ongoing project involving custom-printed shades throughout its facility. “They have all of these archived images—like pictures of Bob Hope and his wife coming off a DC-3, for example,” he says. “But we have to consider how the photographs that are normally wider than taller are going to interact with a shade that’s traditionally taller than wide. So we played around with cropping it and manipulating its position to get it right.” Meanwhile for the hotel in Cincinnati, the big challenge is that the material they’re printing on for these shades is directional in nature. “So it’s not like we can turn an image sideways,” he says. “They all have to be north-south because of the weave, the unique pattern of the material.” When working with old photography for reproduction, Williams says companies might do a little touch-up work to them—if necessary. “Howsignshop.com
April 2014 // Sign Builder Illustrated
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