Chevron Convenience Store Commands Attention with 800 Square Feet of Sublimated Tiles
Newport Beach, Ca - A Chevron convenience store located on Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach, CA, U.S., recently cast away its ordinary image for an artistic new look. The walls in the gas station/mini mart are now covered with 800 square feet of colorful sublimated tiles depicting a lagoon, a mountain sunrise and the Pacific Ocean located just a few short blocks away. Chevron selected these natural landscape graphics to create a comfortable atmosphere loaded with visual interest for customers seeking a quick purchase.

The concept encourages customers to linger and check out the huge selection of hot dogs, sodas, beef sticks, candy, coffee drinks and much more. The trick, of course, was turning this big idea into reality.

While sublimation printing yields vibrant color and great durability, the technology is tough to master. Let’s face it; heating up inks until they transform into a gaseous vapor and permeate an object’s surface is not the easiest way to simulate colors. Yet, Chevron wanted its corporate red and blue accurately portrayed in the graphics.

The owners of this Chevron wisely turned this project over to one of the premiere sublimation shops in the business. Based in Santa Ana, CA, DAMCO has spent over 10 years developing new techniques for achieving extraordinary photorealistic results on a myriad of unique wide format sublimated materials. The innovative shop has sublimated graphics into everything from fine art reproductions to snowboards.

Chevron Convenience Store Commands Attention with 800 Square Feet of Sublimated Tiles

In addition to owning two Roland wide format inkjets and having color experts on staff, the shop actually designs and manufactures its own heat presses. Owner Craig Oakland used all of these advantages to produce some of the most brilliant and revolutionary sublimation graphics ever seen in a convenience store.

DESIGN
The store’s interior designer developed the basic concept from an eight-by-10-inch book with pictures depicting a wide variety of natural graphical elements. She had a simple, three-step request for DAMCO: to use the images in the book, to blend in Chevron red and blue, and to produce graphics big enough to cover the inside of the Newport Beach gas station.

After examining the book, Oakland developed three designs using pictures of the lagoon, the mountain sunrise and the Pacific Ocean. “We scanned the pictures on my desktop and then enlarged the graphics using Roland VersaWorks for the long lagoon image and Ergosoft for the other two,” said Oakland. “Then we finished the design using Photoshop.”

Oakland worked closely with representatives from Chevron to make sure the corporate colors were just right. Chevron’s interior designer stressed the importance of avoiding any look that resembled its competitors.		 Chevron Convenience Store Commands Attention with 800 Square Feet of Sublimated Tiles

PRINT
DAMCO printed the lagoon graphic with the Roland VersaCAMM SP-300V 30" printer/cutter and printed the mountain sunrise and the Pacific Ocean images with the Roland SOLJET SJ--740 74" printer. All three were printed on Roland heat transfer paper with Sawgrass sublimation inks.

“Our Roland printers gave us the size we needed to print all three graphics,” said Oakland. “They also played a key role in giving us quality results with those all-important colors.”

The SOLJET uses variable droplet inkjet technology to precisely control droplet placement in both print head travel and paper feed directions. This advanced technology enabled DAMCO to produce reliable, precision transfers with brilliant color.

TRANSFER AND INSTALL
Oakland has over 13 years of manufacturing experience in the composites industry, where hot presses are the name of the game. He uses this experience to design and build all of his own transfer equipment. “Our custom presses let us change many of the variables during the sublimation process,” he said. “We can transfer images into substrates never before thought possible. And the colors come out looking perfect!”

Thanks to this proprietary technology, DAMCO has practically become the photo lab of the sublimation industry. The 10-year-old sublimation shop actually has chip charts for different materials that the staff uses to check colors. According to Oakland, this is critical, as corporate customers like Pepsi and Coors often demand spot colors as well as process colors.

For the Chevron graphics, Oakland decided to use glass tiles. This technique gives the tiles tremendous durability, as the graphics are transferred on the back side and viewed though the front. It also protects the image from fading due to sunlight exposure, greasy fingers, hot steam, and just about anything else.

Oakland lined the tiles up in one of his six-by-eight-foot heat presses and sublimated up to 30 at a time. The graphics turned out perfectly, with consistently brilliant colors that fit in perfectly with Chevron’s corporate identity. “Most people trying to sublimate graphics have very limited knowledge of the equipment side of the industry, much less printer technology, color correction management and ICC profiles,” said Oakland. “We bring it all together.”

After they sublimated all of the tiles, the DAMCO staff prepped the walls, making them flat and smooth. Then, they manually applied the graphics one tile at a time. The entire job, from design to installation, took less than two weeks. Chevron is so happy with the new look, it is considering adding similar graphics to other gas stations to create a cohesive feel from store to store.

For more information about DAMCO, please visit the Web site at http://www.durabilitycounts.com/.
Copyright © 2006 All rights reserved. Summer 2006 Issue No. 2 The Roland DG Global Network