Window Graphics
A couple of hundred years ago, glass was expensive, crude, and used very sparingly by all but the most wealthy people. The contrast with today couldn't be clearer, where glass is now a high-tech material, strong enough to be used in construction, versatile enough to be able to carry the world's information at the speed of light.
And our built environment is the same, glass is everywhere. Shopfronts, doors, walls, ceilings, street furniture and, of course, windows. As a canvas for graphics, glass is hard to beat. Its transparency offers a vast number of creative possibilities, it's also rigid, non-porous, chemically inert, and resists scratches and impacts. These qualities make it a great surface for graphics installations, and it's not hard to see why window and glass graphics are so popular in retail.
Designers can manipulate many more factors on glass than on opaque media like paper. A lightbox effect, glass mounted translucent print, is simple and easily achieved. In combination with displays and coloured lighting, transparent print can create eye-popping effects. Designers can also control transparency using blocking inks, and use selective transparency in their designs.
Choosing between window film, cut vinyls and other window manifestation substrates is a balance between the effect you want to create, the environmental conditions faced by the graphics, and your budget. If you can keep the graphics inside, they'll have to put up with a lot less weather!
Vinyls are coming in an ever-expanding range of finishes and qualities, allowing you to create frosting effects, mirror finishes and event textured surfaces. Using vector artwork, vinyls can be cut incredibly precisely into complex and interlocking shapes. Piecing them together on a sheet of glass is very much a fine art! On a simpler level, frosting vinyl is widely used to alert people to the existence of glass walls and doors, or as a sight screen for glass-walled offices. Frosting on glass is a great chance to reinforce corporate branding whilst delivering functional improvements to safety and privacy.
Window films let your creativity run riot - you can create transparency, colour, and light-blocking designs to work together with photographic quality print at high resolution. The design is then printed onto glass-clear, window film. This takes normal print design into new dimensions, and needs a very clear understanding of the qualities and variables at play. But the results can be quite stunning in the hands of talented and imaginative designers.
Vinyl graphics can be mounted simply using cohesive molecular force, the phenomenon where vinyl clings very securely to smooth, non-porous surfaces, or they can be mounted using low-tack adhesive. Clinging graphics can't really be used on exterior surfaces, where an adhesive will be needed.
Here’s our quick guide to window graphic materials:
One Way Vision
Material: 50/50 Ratio pattern with 1.5mm Hole size
Typical applications: external and internal window graphics onto flat glass surfaces showing advertising on one side and allowing for a "see-through" view on the other sideUltra Clear Gloss
Material: Removable adhesive and can be printed with white ink
Typical applications: For medium-term advertising on glass surfaces. Any design can be perfectly reproduced, while unprinted areas allow a perfectly clear view through the glass.