Building Unity

As an Olympic worldwide sponsor since 1964, Xerox Corporation wanted to unveil at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City a grand, ambitious project that not only showcased its newest printing technology, but one that involved as many of its employees as possible.

To this end, the company created its Olympic Unity Banner, a seven-story vertical poster whose depiction of five hands holding the Olympic torch beneath the word "unity" comprises a mosaic of nearly 17,000 3x3" color photographs of Xerox employees from 59 countries.

As for spotlighting its latest printing innovations, Xerox decided that the banner, which measures 28 feet wide and 70 feet high, would be printed on its new 54"-wide ColorgrafX X2-54 six-color piezoelectric ink-jet printer.

Xerox chose San Jose, Calif.-based Promotional Fabrics for the printing of the banner.

"Our business is creating large fabric banners," says Promotional Fabrics president Wendell Byram. To create the piece, Promotional Fabrics employed the ColorgrafX X2 to produce an image file on paper using dye-sublimation ink. A 60"-wide Astek 2900 heat-transfer press applied heat and pressure to sublimate the image on paper into 28 different 51 1/2x210" panels of specially treated polyester fabric, which were then sewn together.

One of the chief innovations of Xerox's ColorgrafX X2 is PixelCorrect, an imaging technology that nearly eliminates banding and produces sellable-quality output at the printer's fastest speed, say company officials, which in turn eliminates the need for a draft output mode as a print speed.

ColorgrafX X2, priced at about $30,000, prints at both 360-dpi and 720-dpi resolutions and offers three output modes: productivity mode (which prints 431 square feet per hour), quality mode (260 square feet per hour), and high-quality mode (130 square feet per hour).

"The payback period is usually several months," says John Petralia, vice president and general manager of Xerox's XES graphic arts business unit, Stamford, Conn. "Our target markets are graphic arts service bureaus, sign shops, and corporate in-house printers." Petralia says the company soon will unveil a 36" model as well.

The Unity banner, which will hang outside the Hilton Salt Lake City Center for the duration of the winter games, "is very popular with Xerox employees," says Carl Langsenkamp, Xerox public relations manager.

Langsenkamp explains that a photograph of the banner can be viewed on the Web at xerox.com. Here, by progressively clicking on the banner's image, Xerox employees who participated in the project can view the panel of the banner in which their photograph is located and find their individual images within the mosaic.

"I've received countless e-mails from Xerox employees around the world who have seen their pictures in the banner," says Langsenkamp. "It's been a great morale builder."