Printed ACP Panels for an Accor Office Project in Dubai

For an Accor office project in Dubai, Sun Studio printed a large botanical artwork across a series of ACP panels. The artwork was laid down flat at the studio in Al Quoz, one panel at a time, and the panels were installed afterwards as a finished building surface rather than as something applied over one.

Accor wanted a decorative elevation that belonged to the architecture. That ruled out anything with a visible film edge, and it made the join between two panels the whole problem to solve.

A botanical artwork spanning several printed ACP panels across a building elevation, the panel joins running through the design

Project snapshot

Project: Accor office, Dubai
Material: ACP (aluminium composite panel)
Printing service: Direct UV printing on ACP
Application: Exterior architectural cladding graphics
Artwork: Large-scale botanical, spanning multiple panels
Production: Panels printed flat, aligned to one continuous image

The brief

An image large enough to read across a building elevation cannot be printed in one piece, because no press has a bed that size. It has to be divided, printed in sections, and reassembled by the people installing it. This artwork is dense and organic — colour transitions, gold scrollwork and thrown white detail — and none of it aligns to a grid that would hide a seam.

Two ACP panels aligned on the flatbed so the red and white artwork runs unbroken across the join

Our approach

Each panel was printed as its own file, set out so the artwork continued across the edge into the next one. Colour had to hold across separate passes: a leaf crossing a join is one leaf, and a shift in the green between two panels reads as a fault in the building rather than a fault in the print.

Printing direct means the ink is cured onto the panel face itself rather than printed to vinyl and applied over it, so nothing has an edge that can lift at the join. Sun Studio covers the same ground as a service on its direct UV printing on aluminium composite panels page.

Foliage and colour fields printed across adjoining panels on the press bed

A gold scroll motif printed direct onto the black face of an ACP panel

Production detail

On ACP you are never printing onto aluminium. You are printing onto the coating carried by the aluminium skin, and the coating decides how the ink behaves — which is why an exterior panel is worth proving on a sample rather than assuming.

The dark ground made the white ink do most of the work. The thrown white detail across the design sits on near-black, so its opacity is what carries the effect. Panels were stacked upright as they came off the bed, which is the point at which a rigid panel is easiest to bow or scuff.