Case Studies

The Mucky Ducky

Mucky Ducky is a Vintage shop in Carlisle owned by Ali and Adam Vaughan. Wanting to make a big splash on the one year anniversary of their shop opening they came to us to get some custom balloons printed! Ali and Adam wanted a high impact and great value option. Printed balloons would be perfect!

The Balloons: Having perused our balloon printing colours page, Ali and Adam decided to go with our twelve inch balloons for the largest visual impact and bigger bang for their buck. They liked the look of our metallic pearl finish and felt it would go well with the rest of their shop display that uses plenty of metallic paint! They went with our ‘Pearl Metallic’ colour balloons to provide good contrast with their black artwork and a look of sophistication and quality.

The Logo: Adam provided us with a copy of their logo that they used in their shop and website and social media. We could immediately see it would look great on balloons as it was bold, interesting and with good contrast. In addition as a one colour logo it would reduce the price of the printing. Here is the logo:

Although it is a good logo for printing there were a few issues. There is only limited space to print on a balloon so in order to get the maximum impact you need the logo as big as possible. We thought that removing the frame and lowering the text would create a better end result. Also the image was fairly low resolution and incorporated some grays. Our resident graphic designer and all round art wizard Sam made some adjustments and sent an adjusted logo to Adam so he could see what what the new design would look like:

As you can see, removing the fame and adjusting the position of the words has made the relative size of the logo larger. The printing area of a balloon is essentially circular so the squarer the proportions the bigger it can be on the balloon. We also sharpened up the image so it would be more eye catching and clear. Having had the new artwork approved all we had to do was get the logo on the balloon!

The Screen: Unlike printing on paper, printing on balloons is very involved, Due to the wobbly nature of the substrate and the unique properties of latex balloons we can’t just put it in an ink jet printer and press go! We use a method called ‘screen printing’. A technique that was first used hundreds of years ago and is also sometimes used for printing on t-shirts. With modern materials it is still the best way to get a high quality print on balloons. The first stage is to expose the image you want on your balloons onto a screen. This is a lot like developing a photograph and just as much fun! Here is what a screen looks like after half an hour in our darkroom:

The Printing:The next stage was the actual printing. Using one of our state of the art automatic balloon printing machines our Print Manager – Jules – used the newly created screen to create Mucky Ducky’s Custom Printed Balloons.

The Delivery:In the UK we usually use either Royal Mail or UPS. Sent by next day delivery, Adam & Alison also chose one of our Recyclable Helium Cylinders to get their balloon to float which we delivered with the balloons. We also supplied some matching ribbon so that Alison could create some lovely displays in house.

The Event:On the big day Mucky Ducky’s Custom Printed Balloons proved a big hit and got “loads of lovely comments” from their guests. Adam kindly took the time to write to us thanking us for our service and attached a couple of photographs from the day:

Mission Complete!