Hal Hinderliter

O'Hare flies inkjet signage
November 28, 2007

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Question: During a trip through O’Hare airport, I noticed that quite a few pillars within Terminal 3 were wrapped with large photographic images of the city. Can you tell me what process was used to print these images, and how they wrapped the photos around those columns?

To find out more about this short-run digital printing project, I spoke with Jill McGee, Deputy Commissioner for Marketing and Communications with the City of Chicago’s Department of Aviation and with Patrick Pyszka, photographer for the City of Chicago’s Graphics and Reproduction Center:

“The Department of Aviation’s marketing vision is that the airports should be seen as an extension of the City (of Chicago),” revealed McGee. “More than 50% of our customers at O'Hare are connecting traffic and never have the opportunity to get downtown and see all of the great things the city has to offer. This campaign was created to enhance the awareness of those travelers as well as entice customers who already know Chicago, by showing beautiful photos and depictions of various areas of the city.”

Large project, large format
Nine images were selected for use within O’Hare, with each image comprising its own 36 inch wide, 100 inch tall poster. Each poster had a print run of four, resulting in 36 posters that would later be installed two per pole to cover 18 pillars in all. The output device was an Epson 9800 inkjet printer running Epson semi-gloss photo paper. “The concept was designed by the Graphics and Reproduction Center’s own Kristin Hoffman from an idea by our director Adrienne Fasano, and initially featured posters that were much smaller, just twelve inches wide by four feet tall,” Pyszka recalled. “I was flying through and realized they weren’t very dramatic, and I said ‘I think we can do this bigger, and still make it look good.’”

Working around the department’s busy schedule, the creation of all 36 posters took about one month. The Chicago Department of Aviation’s Sign Shop performed lamination on the front of each poster, then applied a layer of adhesive to the backs. “We tested a variety of different Epson papers to see what could be laminated,” noted Pyszka. “We did lose some prints due to a problem with the laminating machine’s rollers, but otherwise it went pretty well.”

Mounting on a curve
“I went out a couple of times to watch the Chicago Department of Aviation’s carpenters hang them, and I thought it went well,” he observed. “They got all the bubbles out with a flat plastic tool. It was a learning process for everyone… The first poster took 3 hours to install, the second took an hour and one-half, but the third went up in about forty five minutes. In the course of the next week they did all of them, at a rate of less than one hour per pole.”

Pyszka thought that the mounting process seemed eerily familiar. “It was sort of like watching a giant Band Aid being applied in slow motion,” he laughed. “First they taped the top and measured to make sure the prints were centered top to bottom, then they taped the length of one side directly to the pole. Next, the carpenters carefully removed the adhesive backing from the other side of the poster and smoothed it out onto the pillar before untaping the first side and removing the rest of the protective paper. Once the second half’s glue was exposed, they carefully smoothed the image out from the center to the edge.”   

Posted by Hal Hinderliter on November 28, 2007 | Comments (0)