Vertiworks demonstrates its mastery over the creative application of white ink…
Dorset is one of the UK’s beautiful places and it can claim to own one of the nation’s most interesting parts of the coastline too. Walk along some of Dorset’s beaches and it’s possible to pick up part of the region’s historical record in the shape of a fossil that might not have seen daylight for millions of years.
While small finds are commonplace, Dorset’s coast occasionally rewards with something grand and notable - a complete example of something that once walked flew or swam, but that’s now immortalised in stone. It’s an amazing place.
Coming right up to date, Dorset, or Bridport more precisely, is where you won’t have to look quite so hard to find Vertiworks. It’s a successful and highly regarded business that’s the product of a lot of hard work and time invested by Colin Crabb and his team, and it’s earned itself a reputation as the town’s go-to sign making business whose work is also seen much further afield.
Vertiworks isn’t shy when it comes to investing behind its obvious creative talents and among the company’s most recent tools to hit the shopfloor is an HP Latex printer equipped to run the technology giant’s latest generation of inks including the amazingly opaque and fine-featured white. Finding a vent for the new hardware’s creative potential didn’t take Colin and team long and one example arrived in the shape of an enquiry from the Dorset Museum and Art Gallery.
As befits a region with access to such huge reserves of pre-history, not to mention more recent notables such as Thomas Hardy, who made a huge bequest in the 30s, Dorset does museums very well. It really has to. It attracts visitors in serious volumes many of whom want to connect.
Colin’s job has been to take care of the Dorset Museum and Art Gallery’s frontage, a work of art in itself, and to provide graphics and creative input supporting visiting exhibitions, labelling and much more besides.
A few permanent examples of Vertiworks’ talents are evidenced by window graphics that draw from the desirable properties of etch effect films, but that also transcend and enhance their very purpose.
Colin used materials from Metamark’s portfolio of Etch Effect materials to create a series of applied window graphics that admit diffused light into the museum’s interior and that present ambient decorative effects from whatever side of the window the observer is stood.
Colin’s graphics begin with photographs of subject matter relating to the museum’s exhibits and the region, which the team first reduces to duo-tone images. These images are then digitally screened though a half-tone filtering process to produce a result that’s rendered a little like newsprint although it will be digitally printed.
In a ‘normal’ rendering of such matter, an absence of ink would equate to a highlight or light tone. In Colin’s work, that’s a job left to judiciously included white ink elements in the image. The effect is as beautiful as it is effective.
The job was printed by Vertiworks using its HP Latex printer creatively employing its white ink channel. HP’s white ink is notable among digitally delivered whites in the wide format world for being bright, opaque, and having little in terms of physical ‘thickness.’ It contributes to the nett effect desired by quietly doing the job it was designed to do, not drawing attention to itself because it lacks impact and opacity or, crudely put, looks like a pile of ink.
In the right hands and on the right material, the white ink is capable of great subtlety, able to resolve the merest suggestion of itself light enough to look like breath on a mirror, or, at the other extreme spilled paint on a floor! Metamark’s MD-Class media and its etch effect films have always played well with Latex ink and HP printers, Colins work is a great exemplar.
Colin’s work is in evidence inside the museum too in support of visiting events from other parts of the museums’ world. One recent arrival is ‘Gladiators’ a celebration and enquiry into a misunderstood world glamourised in literature and films but distilling to be a hard way to make a living for most.
Vertiworks took prescribed art from its client and turned it all into print-ready works that could be produced and installed in the spaces available. Such wall graphics achieve a huge impact in a space in return for a relatively modest cost and installation is not in the least disruptive when skilled hands are set to the task.
Colin reached for Metamark MD-WA to produce the wall graphics the museum wanted, and the printed and applied result achieves just what the art’s designer intended. Ambient effects are important in venues like museums so it’s important that applied graphics do nothing more than contribute, informing or directing as needed. Always effective. Sometimes understated.
Creativity is one dimension of Vertiworks’ capabilities. In looking at its work using Metamark materials, there’s a lot of technical merit in evidence. Project management skill too must be acknowledged. Keeping a museum returning for more work suggests mastery over the myriad detail and high standards that come with every brief.
If Vertiworks itself is dug out of the ground by curious explorers millions of years hence, it might well lend weight to the conclusion that the men of the Anthropocene made an impact on the planet in a creative and positive sense and who knows, examples of the company’s work may find themselves the subject of a museum’s interest.
