A Printed Sliding Glass Door Entrance in Dubai
The entrance to the PRO TECHnology warehouse in Dubai is a bi-parting sliding glass door with a fixed glass panel on either side. Sun Studio printed all four: a triangle pattern across the two moving leaves, and a white gradient up the fixed panels.
PRO TECHnology is our own parent group, so this is another one built at home, this time on the front of the building rather than inside it.
Project snapshot
- Client
- PRO TECHnology (Sun Studio’s parent group)
- Location
- Dubai
- Material
- Glass
- Printing service
- Glass printing
- Application
- Entrance sliding door and fixed side panels
- Quantity
- Two sliding leaves and two fixed panels
- Production
- Direct UV printing onto the glass
The brief
A glass entrance has to read as glass. A door that looks like an open gap is a door somebody walks into, which is why entrance glazing carries a marking at all. The only question is what that marking is.
The second problem is the one that set the design: two of the four panels move and two do not, so whatever goes on the glass has to still make sense when the doors are open and their artwork has slid behind the fixed panels.
Our approach
The two leaves carry a dense lattice of small triangles, heavy enough to read as a surface from the yard and open enough to see through at standing height. The pattern runs across the join, so the door reads as one field when it is closed.
The fixed panels do the opposite: a white gradient, solid towards the floor and fading out as it rises, so the lower half is private while the upper half still lets daylight through.
Pattern on the moving glass and a plain fade on the static glass is what stops the two fighting each other. Triangles across all four panels would have turned the frontage into one busy wall; a gradient across all four would have left nothing to mark the door.
Production detail
Glass is smooth and non-porous, so nothing soaks in and all of the adhesion is won at the surface. Direct UV printing cures the ink the instant it lands, which is what lets a dense pattern and a soft fade sit on the same run.
A pale fade on clear glass is white ink. The colours in a UV set are transparent and need white behind them before they read as anything on glass, so a gradient is that white layer thinning out, dot by dot, until the glass is clear again.
The result
An entrance that is obviously glass from across the yard, private where it needs to be, and recognisably one company. Both the pattern and the fade are printed into the surface rather than applied over it, so there is no film edge to lift.
Have an entrance to print?
Send the panel schedule: sizes, thickness, quantity and the artwork, and say which panels move. Glass is printed after it is cut, drilled and toughened.
