deep-dishing - Harlan Graphic Arts Service, Inc.

PHOTOS BY JILL HOUP
By MaryKate Moran
DEEP-DISHING
OUT STYLE
Harlan Graphics and FRCH partner on
sumptuous graphics for Chi-nnati’s restaurant.
22
THE BIG PICTURE OCTOBER 2009
Those who drive by the new restaurant can’t help but try
to sound out the name. Is it Chee-nnati’s? Shy-nnati’s?
The moniker Chi-nnati’s (pronounced Shuh-nnati’s, by the
way) is a cross between Chicago and Cincinnati. And if the
restaurant can mix elements from the two cities, why can’t
the graphics and signage do the same?
To match the whimsical, experimental nature of the
restaurant, FRCH Design Worldwide and Harlan Graphics,
both based in Cincinnati, created a variety of graphics that
mix and contrast the Windy City and the Queen City.
It all began when a Chicago transplant decided to open
a pizza place in his adopted hometown. FRCH (frch.com)
put shape and color to the owner’s ideas. Matt Wizinsky,
FRCH’s lead designer for the project, says the client came
to them with the name, the desire to create an authentic
experience, but little else. “It was cool, both because it
was local and because we were creating a brand from the
ground up,” Wizinsky says.
Once similarities and differences between the towns
were hashed out (Chicago cows vs. Cincinnati pigs, a mutual love of sports, cultures built around food, and so on),
the graphic and signage concepts began to form. Which is
when Harlan stepped in to make all those ideas reality. The
two companies had worked together in the past, making
the process smoother.
“Part of the reason we were awarded the project is because we could do A-Z in-house,” says Harlan’s Tom Wendt.
This included not just the digitally printed graphics, but
the illuminated signs, ADA signs, and a few architectural
elements, not to mention installation of everything.
Harlan Graphics (harlangraphics.com) was there for the
smallest details and the largest of the large-format jobs.
And though Harlan worked on the Chi-nnati’s project for
three months, all the signage went up in the final weeks, as
per the owner’s request. Even with the vast array of graphics and signage that had to be installed, Harlan’s fourperson team took just six days to install everything, both
inside and outside.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at the extensive array of
graphics that FRCH and Harlan Graphics partnered to create.
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sumptuous graphics
Sightseeing
Photos like these are displayed
in groups around the restaurant,
and are used to tie together the
various interior elements.
Most of the photos were taken by
a local photographer. FRCH made
recommendations on image selection, and the owner purchased the
photos directly. “Image selection was
based on…combining imagery reflecting
the details of the Cincinnati and Chicago
cityscapes that would resonate with residents of either place,” says Wizinsky.
The images were printed with an Océ
LightJet 430 onto Kodak Metallic Endura
black-and-white and color paper. While
there are obvious landmarks like the Sears
Tower and Wrigley Field, other shots are
of locations known mostly to locals, so
there’s something in it for Chicago and
Cincinnati natives alike.
Found Type Funk
Who Doesn’t?
“This came from the notion of
a reclaimed, repurposed billboard,” says Matt
Wizinsky with FRCH. “We wanted something that created a message without being a [literal] sign.” Signage
codes prevented putting actual words on the piece, so
a mouth-watering solution was found. By creatively
arranging pizza condiments to visually say “I love pizza,”
the billboard became more of a decoration instead of a
sign—as far as the city was concerned—and the restaurant
was able to keep its big-city-inspired exterior.
To create the graphics, Harlan ran four 48 x 96inch, 6mm-thick DiBond panels through its 4-color Inca
Columbia printer producing four full-bleed prints; these
were then covered with an enamel clearcoat and placed
side by side.
Harlan also fabricated and installed the customwelded aluminum building frame, which arrived onsite
pre-built. After the frame was bolted to the building, the
four panels were slid into a channel in the frame and
bolted into place.
THE BIG PICTURE OCTOBER 2009
The welcome sign behind the hostess
stand started out life as two different pieces.
When budget concerns arose, however, instead
of scrapping one of the pieces, the two pieces
were redesigned into one.
The mural art in the background was created
by layering and color correcting high-resolution
images and typography in Adobe Photoshop and
Illustrator. Harlan used its EFI Vutek PressVu UV
320/400 to print onto 13-ounce Fredrix 1008 Solvent Polyflax Canvas wall vinyl. Aside from merging
beloved icons from each city, the mural’s background
name-drops Cincinnati and Chicago neighborhoods.
The found-type pieces in the foreground were also
digitally printed. Harlan ran 12 x 12 inch x 1/2-mil
aluminum pieces through an HP Scitex FB6700 flatbed,
then attached them to plywood pieces. These were
finished with an enamel clearcoat and cleat-mounted to
the mural. The type, says Wizinsky, mimics lettering from
old warehouses in both cities, one of many nods to their
industrial backgrounds.
A separate company created the wooden enclosure
for the stand, and the Harlan crew installed the sign in
two steps. The mural was put in place, left to sit for a day,
then the team installed the printed type and pin-mounted
the dimensional, white “Welcome.”
Harlan’s Evolution
Harlan Graphic Arts Services (harlangraphics.com) has
been serving the graphic-design community since 1980,
but it’s come a long way from its early days. Originally
a purveyor of typesetting and films, it now provides
signage and environmental graphics for clients across
the nation. Films and typesetting have given way to
large-format prints, routed signs, and LEDs.
“Anymore, the unusual is the norm for us,” says Dan
Ehrman, Harlan’s vice president of purchasing. It was his
brother Larry who started the company. Ehrman, who has
been with Harlan for 15 years, recalls the day when the
company began its switch to bigger and better things.
“A salesman came in one day with a 36-inch inkjet
and said, ‘Sell one print a day and you’ll pay for it.’ That
was the beginning,” he says. Ehrman can’t recall the
brand of that inkjet, bought nearly 10 years ago, but,
“As we continued to grow, we kept buying inkjets.” Now,
years later, Harlan has an array of printers at its nearly
40,000-square-foot facility. In addition to the printers
referenced in the text, the shop has in-house a DuPont
Artistri 2020, Roland SolJet Pro III, an HP Designjet
5000ps, and a Mimaki CJV 30-160.
The company’s growth has largely been customerdriven, with clients suddenly demanding a variety of
services. Harlan entered the cut-vinyl business, Ehrman
says, and then customers began asking for more signage
projects. “From there we received requests for large-
scale vinyl and wall murals,” he says.
Harlan added fabric-printing capabilities six years
ago. Its display division has grown over the last few
years into a full metalworking and woodworking shop.
Just last year, it shut its typesetting equipment down;
it needed replacing, but no one was even asking for the
service. The entire film department is gone as well.
But these new resources have landed Harlan some
major clients, including Hilton Hotels. The company
prints banners for the hotel chain’s food stations, consisting of the company’s namesake, Doubletree Hotels,
Hampton Hotels, and Homewood Suites. When Harlan
printed the laminated signs that sit on the buffets, Hilton
needed to be sure they would be durable. “I took one of
[the signs] home and washed it six times in the dishwasher,” says Ehrman, just to reassure them that the ink
wouldn’t run.
Which is another thing Harlan has come to pride itself
on: personal touches. The 35-person company often
invites potential clients to tour its facility. “If we can get
the customers to come in here—because we are so diversified—they see the different processes we have and it
gets the creative juices flowing,” Ehrman says. Whenever a client brings him a quirky project—like creating a
graphic backing for an industrial baking pan, or 3-foot
long CNC-routed flying spoons, complete with wings—he
checks with the fabrication team about the capabilities,
but they almost always say “yes.”
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25
sumptuous graphics
Tasty Alternatives
Outside the Print Envelope
Harlan goes beyond digital print work (see page 25), and that
expertise was called upon for the Chi-nnati’s project. From
faux concrete to creative bathroom signage, Harlan had the
place covered inside and out. In the end, it made the elements all the more cohesive.
Hit the pavement: These signs—one over the entrance and
one high enough to be visible from an adjacent street—are
meant to illustrate the blending of the two cities, and to
reference the industrial grit associated with both. “The intent
was to look like city blocks,” Wendt says. Harlan custom
form-welded 1/8-inch aluminum lightboxes and covered
them with latex for the faux concrete
finish. One-inch clear acrylic was
routed for ½-inch protruding backlit 3D
logo lettering. Low-voltage LEDs were
used for illumination. “It’s new and slick
meets old and gritty,” says Wizinsky,
adding that the signs were designed
for some light to leak, creating an
unfinished look.
Bathroom Branding
No “blah” ADA signage here: Harlan recreated the found-type logo from the hostess stand on polypropylene paper using
an 8-color HP Designjet Z6100; a clear,
1/4-inch, non-glare acrylic ADA substrate
by Rowmark was added on top. A Beam Dynamic laser was used to die-cut the 1/32inch letters, and a Vision-2448 Engraving
System was used to create the Braille.
As with any project, budget was a concern. Initially, the
restaurant’s owner wanted a large mirror engraved with
various quotes about pizza, but when the cost of the
mirror itself proved prohibitive, the team regrouped and
delivered another option.
To solve the problem, Harlan produced this 40 x 60inch print. Here, it turned to its EFI Vutek PressVu UV
320/400, outputting the graphics onto 13-ounce Fredrix
1008 Solvent Polyflax Canvas; this was then stretched
across a wooden frame.
Digital printing enabled FRCH and Harlan to deliver
everything the owner asked for instead of scrapping
concepts. Sometimes the new ideas required some
tweaking, but, “All the visual elements that were
conceived were executed,” says Harlan’s Tom Wendt.
Other canvases featured icons that had also been
used on the atrium shadowbox and the exterior billboard. These icons were created in Adobe Illustrator
as vector art, so scaling them up to large sizes was
not an issue.
C it?: This supersized “C,” hand-painted with exterior latex paint, has a diameter of 15 feet (there’s another one
13 feet in diameter beneath the main
sign at the entrance). The concept for
it came from those old, faded signs
that used to be painted directly on
brick buildings throughout the country.
Shadowboxing
Cut heads: Harlan picked up the same
wood stain used by the interior designers
throughout the restaurant so the wood on the
bathroom signs coordinated with other architectural elements. These 3/4-inch hardwood
maple signs were routed on a MultiCam-M
Series router. The head is a standard stainlesssteel pizza cutter wheel.
Metal message: FRCH created this font specifically for the project, which is used on metal
signage both inside and outside the restaurant.
Here, the focus was again on having an
industrial look: “We wanted something
that looked like it had been stamped
into the side of an I-beam,” says Wizinsky. These letters were forged from
1/2-inch Type-1 PVC with Chemetal333 laminate on their face.
THE BIG PICTURE OCTOBER 2009
Can’t Stand
the Heat
Lightbox panels,
set above television displays in the bar area,
were designed to bring some warmth to
the main room. The graphics were designed
in Adobe Illustrator, then output using the
shop’s Océ LightJet 430 onto backlit Kodak
Professional Duratrans display material.
Next came an overlay of clear-mount, 1/4inch, non-glare, clear acrylic. The finished
product has a metallic quality.
Chi-nnati’s atrium shadowbox is a good example of how
all the restaurant’s graphics and signage—even on an
assortment of substrates—ties together.
Harlan ran two Evonik Acrylite acrylic panels through its
HP Scitex FB6700 and set these
apart with an aluminum frame to
create depth. The back panel—an
acrylic mirror—was printed with
the found type logo and then
slightly distorted with a 1/2-inch
thick clear panel, which was printed
on its backside with the same ingredient icons seen throughout the interior.
A MultiCam M Series router was used
to cut the panels. The shadowbox measures 42 x 84 x 2 inches.
MaryKate Moran is a contributing editor
to The Big Picture magazine.
www.bigpicture.net