MegaPrint, Inc.

New Blog!

2010-01-18T05:30:00.000-08:00

We moved our blog. If you would like to continue following us, please visit http://blog.megaprint.com/ ! Thanks!

3 Steps to a Great Banner Stand!

2009-12-01T12:11:00.000-08:00

Make sure you have great color and a sharp image!

When you are selecting your background image and colors, remember more is NOT better here. You want to have attractive colors that attract the customer's eye, but you don’t want to be garish. You also want to pick an image that allows space for your logo and text.

Don’t try to say too much!

Use a short phrase to get your customer’s attention. Remember that this is just what gets them interested. You want to get them in and talk to them. If you give them too much information up front, they won’t read it all. You only have a few seconds to spark their interest.

Your message should be at eye level!

Get your main point across in a few words. You can add your web address at the bottom, and suggest that they follow you on any social media you participate in as well. However, the important stuff goes at eye level, and in a brief “catch phrase.”

Finally, if you need help designing your banner stand we can help. We can print it for you too!

Social Media and Signage

2009-11-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

In our ever-changing marketing world, we have to adapt to the trends! Promote your online presence in your offline materials. MegaPrint, Inc. has a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account, as do many companies and individuals these days. Do you? Social media is a great way to reach new customers, keep current customers informed, and build credibility by having your customers post comments about your product and services. These marketing mediums are tried and true ways to build your business.

Put them on your signage! If you are going to a trade show, putting up a grand opening sign, or just some meeting and event signage add a line of text that says, “Follow us on Twitter!” or “Become a fan of our Facebook page.” Use the familiar logos that Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter provide. This is a way to let your clients know you are there. Not many people will go out searching for you on these social medias unless you let them know you are there.

Consider how much time people spend on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc! Don’t miss out on your next opportunity to spread the word about your social media endeavors through your printed signage.

Construction Banner in Plymouth

2009-11-18T11:05:00.000-08:00

OK, so here's a banner for a new Chinese-Japanese restaurant they are building in Plymouth.

The idea to have a sign announcing the new restaurant is great, especially since 25,000 cars go by every day. For a few hundred dollars, they'll get over three million advertising impressions by the time the restuarant opens in the spring. That ought to help the takeout business!

The name of the restaurant? We're not so sure about that. The owner is Alan, who also owns Mandarin Taste in Plymouth, and we expect the food to be terrific!

Banner Hangers

2009-11-12T09:27:00.000-08:00

If you need a stylish way to hang your banners try our banner hangers! We have Aluminum banner hangers, plastic SuperSnap, Gotcha Hangers, and Vee hangers! No matter the setting, trade show, store front, or backdrop these hangers will do the job and look great!

The Aluminum banner hanger has a brushed steel look that is clean and elegant. These come with both the clips and the S hooks, so when you get your banner and hangers you are ready to go! As long as your banner width is shorter than 89" we will attach your banner hangers and roll them with your print.

If you are looking for something with the same great holding power, but you are on a budget? You should try the SuperSnap! It works just like our aluminum option and comes in black and white. We can ship these on your graphic up to 72" wide, anything wider and we ship it in two pieces ready for you to install on site.

If you are hanging smaller posters (36" x 48" or less) we recommend the Gotcha Hangers. These are ideal for lightweight prints. Vee hangers are also a great option for very light weight posters!

If you would rather have a pole pocket on your banner or poster, we can do that too!

Fabric Banners

2009-11-05T05:19:00.001-08:00

Here's a cool job we did recently for the
US Forest Service for their new building in Campton, NH. The banners are printed on a fire resistant fabric, and show scenes from the White Mountain National Forest, which they manage. Did you know there are over 2000 hiking trails in the White Mountains? It's one of the reasons we love living here.

The banners have pole pockets sewn in the top and bottom, with a sturdy 1" dowel in the top. We also made some displays in the lobby with pictures that flip up to reveal a caption about the picture.

The Forest Service used to be next door to us in Holderness, so we are going to miss them as neighbors. The good news is that Sheila and Marty Riehs of Resource Mangement Inc. have bought the building, and they have been friends for years.

Banners Banners Banners

2009-10-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

Fall seems to be banner season, and the vinyl banner department has been busy! Several customers have been kind enough to send us photos of our product being used.

Here is a photo from Artesian Spas, a major maker of hot tubs, showing our banners in a dealer showroom.

If you drive to our shop (which, since we are an internet based company, doesn't happen much, we admit) you'll see a helluva big building taking shape on Holderness Road. It's the new Plymouth State hockey rink, and we've got a vinyl jobsite banner out front telling people what the building will be and showing the architect's drawing of it.

Here's another banner we did for the New Hampshire Historical Society, announcing a new exhibit.

Getting the best graphics for your money!

2009-09-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

We are seeing smaller budgets for marketing this year, many folks are trying to get the most for their trade show dollar.

We have many different options for keeping the price down, without losing the quality that makes your company look great. A lot of folks are trying out banner stands rather than full Pop-up booths. This is a good affordable option that allows you to still display clean professional graphics. Often, you can place three of them side-by-side to create a pop-up booth affect.

Tabletop displays are another option! These can be a tabletop pop-up booth, or a carpeted tabletop display. These don’t give you the impressive backdrop style of the others, but it’s good for small spaces.

For pole and drape set-ups you can use a matte vinyl banner for your backdrop, and incorporate a couple of banner stands to fill out the booth.

MegaPrint, Inc. Celebrates 15yrs of Business!

2009-09-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

We celebrated MegaPrint's 15th anniversary last Sunday on Squam Lake in Holderness, NH. George at the order desk took us out to his family’s island, which is absolutely fabulous! We had a great time, grilling, swimming and spending time together.

The weather co-operated, we had way too much food, and the water was warm. We even had loons swimming just off the shore.

So, Happy Birthday MegaPrint, Inc. Here are some pictures of our adventures on Sunday!

Getting Ready For Your Trade Show

2009-08-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

We pride ourselves on giving you beautiful, quality graphics fast! As you get geared up for your trade show season, here are some things to help you along the way.

Your Booth

Have a colorful graphic that catches the customer's eye.

Have a headline of six words or less that will interest your target customer.

Very often, something that helps you explain your product as you talk to the customer can be helpful.

Our turn time on most trade show graphics is 2-3 days, so we can get it done fast! If you need design work done, or you have a special order, it may take a few more days.

Whether you are looking for a graphics, pop-up booth, tabletop display, banner stand, or a banner and banner hangers, we can help!

For our compete trade show primer click here! Or call (800) 590-7850

Gator Board or Foamcore Board?

2009-08-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

If you are having trouble deciding between foamcore and gatorboard, here are two key questions to ask yourself.

1) How long am I going to use this?

If the answer is a few days, go with foamcore, it will work fine and is less expensive than gatorboard. Your typical meeting sign that stands on an easel for a few days can be done very successfully with paper on foamcore board.

Somthing that needs to last should be mounted to gatorboard. Foamcore will bend with changes in humidity, and gatorboard will remain flat for years.

2) How is it going to be used?

If you are going to take it from place to place, gatorboard will look better much longer. It's tougher stuff for going in an out of your car, etc. For things that are really going to be slapped around, consider using our edge trim to protect the edges.

Anything that is a permanent display, like pictures of buildings you have built or historical pictures of your town, should be on gatorboard. For graphics to look good for many years, you should consider UV inks, which will not fade over the years.

Foamcore and gatorboard look a lot alike. The difference is that while foamcore is paper on either side of a slice of styrofoam, gatorboard is a heavy (think oak tag) moisture impregnated paper on either side of the same styrofoam. Since the paper doesn't accept moisture, it is much more stable dimensionally. It's also just plain tougher. Gatorboard comes in black and white, foamcore only in white.

Banner Stands- Everywhere!

2009-08-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

I spent 10 days in Scotland in July, and one thing that I noticed was the number of banner stands being used! Most retail stores, the train station, even our little hiker's hotel had a banner stand to communicate their message to passers by.

What's great about them is, first of all, how easy they are to use. Three poles fit together, and you draw the banner out of the cannister and hang it on the pole. Done! No hardware is required, no tools, no stepladder to put fittings in the false ceiling. If you decide to move it, it takes a minute.

We offer two banner stands. Our economy stand will do a great job if you aren't going to beat it around. If it will be transported regularly and you plan to change the graphic a lot, our premium banner stand is a better choice. It's more durable, and the graphic is easy to change yourself.

With either one, you have a way of communicating with your customer quickly, easily, and flexibly. Give it a try!

Lamp Post or Wall Mounted Banners

2009-07-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

These banners are wonderful for taking a message down main street! They typically are double sided so they can be read by people going either way, and can be printed on gloss vinyl or matte vinyl. We can make replacement banners, or, if you are starting fresh, we can supply the hardware too. Banner widths are 18”w – 36” and usually no more than 8 feet tall. You should not have more than 24 square feet of graphic to the wind (due to the force on the lamp post).

You can create the graphics, or we can do it for you!

Features of our Lamp Post Banners:
3-5 year life in sunlight

Vibrant, accurate colors
Nylon re-enforced material has great strength
Hemmed around, with pole pockets top and bottom
Very competitive with screen printing
Available on matte or gloss 13 oz vinyl

Protecting your print from fading

2009-07-08T11:02:00.001-07:00

If you've ever left a magazine on a window sill for a month or two, you'll be familiar with fading. Most printing inks will fade when exposed to UV light. And, since fluorescent lighting also emits UV, it can happen to prints hanging in your office, even if they are not getting direct sunlight from your window.

To keep your prints from fading, we need to use UV stable inks. Anything that is going in a window, or that will be up for years, should be printed with them. UV inks are good for up to two years in sunlight, and just about forever (well, OK, 20 years) in a normal office environment. Trade Show graphics and meeting signs are used for just a few days, and we find that UV inks are not normally required.

People often ask about using lamination to reduce the amount of UV that reaches the print. This is a throwback to the days before we had UV inks. While our testing does show that lamination slows fading, it does not stop it. We think the solution is really to use the inks that do not fade.

The good news is that the latest HP equipment gives excellent color with UV inks. Older equipment did not give us good reds, and we had to make tough choices between color fidelity and longevity. Today, you can get both. Less filling, and tastes great!

More Cutouts!

2009-06-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

We've done a lot of cutouts lately, and they are fun! Here's a customer clowning around with one that they brought to a trade show. We've also seen a lot of them being done for promotions, events, and retail stores.

When people talk about green shoots in the economy, this is our gauge- that people are having fun again. Since a lot of cutouts are done for fun things like events, we are calling a turn in the economy. You heard it here first!

Wine Winners

2009-06-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

We've had a lot of fun doing blowups of wine labels for Charity Hop, a company that markets the bottling of wine in partnership with a
number of sports celebrities to raise money for charity.

Here are pictures of Mark Buehrle of the White Sox and Derrek Lee of the Cubs with their wine labels. Not only did they turn out great, but we turned them around in four hours!

The best part of all was going to the launch of the Red Sox players wines in Fenway park last year. Good wine, too, we might add. Over the last few years, Charity Hop has released over 30 wines in conjunction with pro athletes, and raised $1.4 million for charity.

Big Mounted Pieces

2009-06-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting job we did recently.
Our customer, Kenyon International, needed
a two sided gatorboard mounted graphic 73x85" for their trade show booth. We printed it as two pieces 36.5" wide, and were able to cut the pieces so the seam is almost invisible.

Because of the size, we couldn't ship the job via our normal Fedex, so we put it in a van and dropped it off on the way to a visit with the folks!

We do lots of trade show work, everything from board mounted graphics to vinyl banners. We have the experience in helping thousands of companies get their graphics done right, on time, and affordably!

Clear Vinyl Window Cling

2009-06-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures of a fun job we printed recently.

This was for a pet grooming business. They wanted something that would allow the inside of their store to be seen from the sidewalk, but still put pictures of happy pets in the window.

We printed photos on clear cling with our solvent HP 9000 printer. The material was installed in their window using a felt squeege and adhesive vinyl application fluid.

Clear window cling is durable, easy to install, and you can see through the clear cling like stained glass! We also offer white cling for those who want a white background.

The cost is less than many other window applications, such as stenciling, so it is easier on your wallet too.

When the time comes to change the graphics, cling will peel right off the window.

Little Cutouts

2009-05-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun job we did over the last few days- little cutouts! The parents of a group of four high school chums wanted to do something special for their high school graduation party. We printed twenty pictures of the boys, laminated them and mounted them to gatorboard, and then cut them out and put easel stands on the back. They will be used as table center pieces. How fun!

Museum Displays

2009-05-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

We've done several museum displays recently, and thought they might be of interest.

Here's an octagonal table with six display panels surrounding a backlit tabletop. The display is at the Des Moines County Heritage Center, Burlington Iowa, and was designed by Will Thompson of Armadillo Arts. The view is from above.

Museums often have large wall spaces to cover with pictures of natural settings, historical photos, etc. Our wallpaper does the trick!

And, of course, you will want a vinyl banner announcing your latest exhibit.

Here's one of our banners outside of the New Hampshire Historical Society, announcing their exhibit of the work of nature photographer Ralph Larrabee.

Cardboard Cutouts

2009-04-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

We do a lot of one-off cutouts for events and trade shows. Cutting them out by hand is costly, however, and we've recently introduced a technology that allows us to make multiples cost effectively. What we do is direct print them onto white cardboard, cut them out with a digital cutter, and add a cardboard stand. For quantities of 5-100 pieces, this is a very good way to make cut-outs.

The cutouts in the picture above were done to publicize summer athletic programs in schools.

Sometimes the cutouts are not people! Here's a picute of a car cutout we did recently. It's not the first car we've done, either! These are typically shipped in a few pieces and have multiple stands in back.

Smart Posters

2009-04-13T05:46:00.000-07:00

Bring excitement to a conventional sign stand! A digital picture frame in a standard poster allows you to change content and have the movement that brings customer attention.

The digital picture frame has an internal 512 mb of memory, so it will hold over 1000 jpg photos. In addition, it will show photos from a memory stick or SD memory card (the kind used in digital cameras). Photos in a 3:4 aspect ratio will fill the frame completely, and the frame automatically resizes photos to fit. If, for instance, you wanted to have pictures of a dozen of your products cycling on the frame, you could put them all on a memory stick and have the frame show them every 5, 10, or 20 seconds.

Note that the frames need electricity. The backlighting of the pictures uses more power than can reasonably be supplied by a battery.

Pop-Up Booths

2009-03-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Pop-Up booths are a great way to make a splash at your next trade show. They are great looking and easy to set up. You can also carry them into the venue, instead of paying to have them delivered from receiving to your booth area.

There are many different brands of pop-up booth, and we can make replacement panels for any of them. We find it best that you ship the booth to us so that we can be sure everything fits together perfectly.

You'll find our panels look great on your booth, at about half the price of panels from the booth manufacturer!

One strategy for those on a budget is to buy a used pop-up booth (you can find them on EBay and at used booth dealers) and have us make the new graphics. We also have a booth that we sell for $2500.

BIG Backlit!

2009-03-02T06:27:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting job we did recently for Armadillo Arts in Iowa City, Iowa. The customer wanted to put a display in a space that was a large window. We produced a large backlit graphic, and they built a box over the window to hold the graphic. Sunlight is all that is required to do the lighting, since the museum is open only during the day.

Pictured here is Will Thomson, who designed the exhibit.

The east window in the Grand Gallery as installed (image size 53" x 104") is an enlargement of a 1900 photo of a Meskwaki lodge at Tama, from the State Historical Society of Iowa. The Meskwaki left Des Moines County as a result of the Black Hawk Treaty in the 1830s.

In the same museum, we produced a backlit tabletop graphic, shown here viewed from above.

The interactive map unit is entitled "A topographic history of Des Moines County" and features a backlit map and several stations that show different aspects of county development: ghost towns, railroad and stage lines, early mills and factories, historic sites and natural areas.
A view of the map unit during installation (east is at the top). Cabinetry by Paragon Cabinet of Iowa City.

Banner Hangers

2009-02-06T05:50:00.000-08:00

Putting up your banner is often as much work as having it printed. Fortunately, we've been down this road before, and we can offer solutions.One of the best options we have found is our aluminum banner hanger, pictured below. It's light, sturdy, and attractive.

We also have banner hangers in plastic for those on a budget. Both flip open to accept the banner, and flip shut to hold it. Plastic plugs finish off the ends for a clean look, and clips slide into a channel on the top to accept a hook, or just about any other hanging method.

No matter what you want to hang, these banner hangers are easy to use, light weight, and portable. Give us your thoughts on how you might use these banner hangers!