Printed Glass Throughout the DreamDraw Offices
DreamDraw fitted out its offices in Dubai and wanted the glass to carry the design rather than sit behind it. Sun Studio printed the lot: the feature wall in the CEO office, the entrance doors, and the shopfront glazing.
The largest piece is the CEO office wall — ten metres wide by 2.4 metres tall, printed with horses running across a desert at sunset.
Project facts
- Client
- DreamDraw
- Location
- Dubai
- Material
- Architectural glass, doors and shopfront glazing
- Printing service
- Glass printing
- Application
- CEO office feature wall, entrance doors, shopfront branding
- Largest panel run
- 10 metres wide by 2.4 metres tall
- Production
- Direct UV printing onto the glass
The requirement
Ten metres of continuous artwork is not one sheet of glass, so the image had to carry across several panels and still read as a single desert horizon from the far side of the room.
The rest of the office had a different problem. Doors and shopfront glazing carry three brands — DreamDraw, Dream Al Amarat Perfumes and Dream Horizon Investments — and every logo had to hold its own colour on dark glass.
What we did
The feature wall was printed panel by panel with the artwork split across the run, so the horses and the horizon line meet correctly where the panels join. Getting that right is a prepress job as much as a printing one.
On the doors, a white layer was printed underneath the colour. The glazing is a deep near-black green, and gold on dark glass goes muddy without a white base behind it — with one, the gold stays gold.
Everything was printed onto the glass itself rather than applied as film. On an entrance door, handled every few seconds all day, a film edge is the first thing to lift.
Technical considerations
Glass is printed after it has been cut, drilled and toughened, never before. Toughened glass cannot be cut or drilled afterwards, so each panel arrived at its finished size with its fixing holes already in it.
A wall this size is as much a handling problem as a printing one. Panels of this format have to be moved, printed flat and moved again without a mark on the printed face.
The outcome
An office where the glass is the finish rather than a surface with branding stuck to it, from a ten metre feature wall down to the door you push to get in.