Retail
Lightboxes with backlit graphics for a showroom floor
Lightboxes with backlit graphics produced for Beauty Rest. Showroom retail is read down long sightlines and from oblique angles, which changes what a lit graphic has to do: it needs to hold up at forty paces and still look right to someone standing beside it.
What the job demanded
The failure mode of a lightbox is never the print, it is the light. Put an LED array too close behind a diffusing face and you see the lamps as a grid of bright spots; space them too far apart and you get banding between them. On a wide face those defects become more likely, because the illuminated area grows faster than the depth available to spread light across it. Showroom floors compound this by being viewed at an angle, where any unevenness across the face is exaggerated and the frame casts its own shadow line into the image. Graphics also change with the season, so the face has to be replaceable, and the replacement has to match the fixture it goes into rather than the one next to it.
How it was produced
The boxes were built around the light rather than the other way round. Cavity depth was set to give the LED output room to spread and overlap before it reaches the face, with a diffusion layer to even out what remains, which is what removes hot spots and lamp lines on a wide opening. The graphic is a tensioned face rather than a rigid panel: a bead sewn around the perimeter of the printed material seats into a channel in the extrusion, pulling the surface flat so there are no ripples to catch the light, and letting the image run to the edge of the frame. Faces were printed to a backlit density curve, because ink read through transmitted light behaves differently from ink read off a surface, and approved illuminated in the fixture.
