Ok. I have to admit it. I have been a student at World Martial Arts for the past 10+ years. My family and I are all multi degreed black belts and my daughters are both instructors. There is no better place to learn martial arts than World Martial Arts and Grand Master Yun is the best teacher I have ever worked with. That makes this job personal for me.
When we started working on the design for this job, we gathered a number of pictures from Grand Master Yun that he might want to see on the windows. We then designed a number of options using characters that were prevalent throughout the Korean populace. We used symbols that appear throughout the culture and are very dominate in the Tae Kwon Do community. We submitted 14 different designs to Grand Master Yun for him to chose from and you can see which four made the cut. We took a high resolution photo of Grand Master as the picture for the first window. The second window we used the logo and the phone number for the school. The third window we used a silhouette of a student doing a flying side kick along with the Korean characters spelling out Tae Kwon Do. The four window is a Master instructor doing a high rising side kick. The colors behind the images come from the International Tae Kwon Do Federation.
When it came time to print the designs, we printed on 60/40 perforated vinyl. The 60/40 means that 60 of the vinyl is there with 40% removed creating holes in the materials. Because the windows face the south and will have maximum sun exposure, we decided to laminate the prints. This will make sure that the colors don’t fade over the years. The down side is that when the vinyl does fail, it will be because the laminate shrunk. All laminates shrink over years, whether your vendor is telling you that or not. Any time you place two dissimilar products (perforated vinyl and laminate) you have different rates of expansion and contraction. Over years, this difference will cause the print to peel. There is nothing that can be done to prevent this other than not laminating the print. If you chose to not laminate the print, the odds of the print fading over years is much higher. The normal life of a window print like this is about two years. This one is now going on 5 years and still looks great.
If you have a need for window or wall graphics, please give Optimum Signs a call. We can work with your artwork or create all new artwork. We can be contacted at 262.289.9481 or emailed at info@optimumsignswi.com.