It’s Fun to Find Out What Opportunities Exist in Museum Graphics By Richard Romano ICL Imaging /Currier Museum of Art A Currier Museum of Art. nyone living in New England in the 1970s likely ICL Imaging printed this display of artist Cristi Rinklin’s work for Manchester, NH’s remembers the vintage TV commercial for Boston’s Museum of Science, whose tagline was “it’s fun to find out.” The phrase can apply to museum graphics, and in a variety of senses. If there is one big advantage to producing museum graphics, it’s that it can be endlessly fascinating. Museums are designed to educate visitors, of course, and if you specialize, at least in part, in producing display materials for museums, an ancillary benefit is that you can pick up a motley assortment of arcane knowledge. “It’s interesting, that’s for sure,” said Jay Buckley, owner of Plymouth, NH’s MegaPrint. Founded more than 20 years ago, the small company specializes in the full gamut of wide-format graphics, including museum graphics. “We’ll get a job and everyone will stand around reading it.” One such project was for the Time and the Valleys Museum in Grahamsville, NY, which focuses on public works projects that supply water to New York City. “I find it kind of fun to see a job like that go through the place,” Buckley admitted. Printing companies aren’t in business to have fun—although it’s a great perk when it happens—but given the sheer number of museums, large, small, and everything in between, and the fact that many have changing exhibits, it can be a profitable niche and a good source of repeat business, and one that doesn’t differ dramatically from the core business. For MegaPrint, expanding into museum graphics was a natural extension of the work it had already been doing. “It seemed to be something that was down our line,” said Buckley. “You see a lot of large-format printing in museums. Museums would find us online, which is how we do our marketing, and we’ve been printing for some museums for 10 or 12 years, maybe longer.” Once MegaPrint had a sizeable enough portfolio, it put a “Museum Displays” page on its website. “Google picks it up and when people search ‘museum graphics,’ it shows up.” It’s fun to find out how search engine optimization works. Although MegaPrint has had some of its work appear in the Smithsonian Institution, the majority of its clients tend to be small, regional museums, such as Wolfeboro, NH’s World War II-oriented Wright Museum of N.H.; the museum at the New Hampshire Historical Society; the museum located in the observatory at the summit of Mount Washington; the Time and the Valleys Museum; and, at perhaps the very opposite end of the cultural spectrum, the Museum of Sex in New York City. “I don’t think museum graphics are that different than printing for a trade show or someone’s corporate office,” added Buckley. “You’re trying to create something that’s good-looking and memorable, and that runs through just about everything that we do.” For another company, specializing in trade show graphics led to museum graphics. Framingham, MA-based ICL Imaging was founded in 1956 and over the years has grown to specialize in an extensive variety of wide-format graphics— banners, window graphics, vehicle graphics, and 22 Wide-Format Imaging | July 2015 MyPRINTResource.com
Wide-Format Imaging July 2015
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