Sweet TARTA Wraps

Most people perceive city-transit buses as a mundane, noisy form of public transportation. Toledo Area Rapid Transit Authority (TARTA) officials chose a different tack and opted to decorate several of their buses with artistic wraps. TARTA enlisted students from Bowling Green State Univ.’s graphic-design program to devise colorful wrap pictorials that create a “Green World” theme: autumn leaves, spring kite flying, and verdant summer scenery with environmentally oriented messages.

TARTA subsequently hired Toledo-based Off Contact Productions (OCP) to fabricate the six-wrap program. The shop produced the graphics – each bus’s wrap measures approximately 700 sq. ft., according to James Schall, the shop’s founder – on 3M™ Scotchcal™ IJ40 repositionable film with a glossy overlaminate. OCP printed the wraps on its HP Designjet 9000 printer using Budget Inks non-OEM, mild-solvent inks.