Out in the Cold

Flying Colors fabricators and installers left their comfortable Berkeley, CA facility to brave an upstate New York winter to install a banner program that promoted the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Winter Classic 2008, a New Year’s Day match-up between the Buffalo Sabres and Pittsburgh Penguins that the teams played outdoors before more than 70,000 shivering fans at Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson Stadium.

League officials sought to aggressively promote the inaugural event. The graphic program included field-level wall banners, concourse wraps, tunnel covers and soft-sided signs for the locker rooms, press box and numerous other locations. In addition to the banner volume and the harsh Buffalo climate, Flying Colors’ Katie Carney said the crew was allowed only four days to dismantle graphics that branded the facility as home of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills into a “hockey winter wonderland.”

Using Adobe® Photoshop®, designers used the NHL’s furnished stock graphics to develop the signs’ size and scale.

Flying Colors produced the 196-banner, 63,824-sq.-ft. system using various media and imaging technologies. For the architectural installations, such as canopies that hung over the teams’ locker-room entrances, the shop used direct-digital dye sublimation on polyester. For installations in enclosed or interior corridors, fabricators output the program using dye sublimation on fireproof fabric and dye-dispersion imaging on polyester.

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For high-traffic locations that required optimal color rendering, Flying Colors employed its EFI 3360 solvent-ink printer and flexible-face and mesh materials. Because the project was created for one-time use, the shop didn’t use laminates.

Predictably, the harsh conditions required stauncher fastening than a garden-variety, banner installation. Components that would face the harshest weather conditions were screwed into walls with reinforced hems and grommets, while others were situated with Velcro® strips and tie wraps.

Carney said, “Given the frozen landscape, ingenuity was required to create an installation system that would withstand the elements and present these graphic treatments in their best light.”