Poster Printing on Fabric: Tips from Denise Hills

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Denise Hills sent a note to ESIP-all with some very helpful tips about printing a poster on fabric. Check it out!

With AGU and the ESIP Winter meeting coming up, I thought I’d share my experience with fabric poster printing. I’ve had several folks ask me about the company I used last year, Spoonflower http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome and so I’m putting this out there for anyone who may be interested.

I found out about Spponflower through this post that compares several different ways to print a fabric poster: http://www.ascb.org/how-to-print-a-fabric-poster/ Conclusion? Spoonflower was better than the commercial service, and significantly less expensive. Another post about them: https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/labhacks-the-25-scrunchable-scientific-poster/ One reason they’re relatively cheap is that Spoonflower is actually a custom fabric company, and doesn’t specialize in poster printing per se. However, they’ve now put up a tutorial here: https://support.spoonflower.com/hc/en-us/articles/204266984-How-to-Create-a-Fabric-Poster-from-a-PowerPoint-or-PDF

It’s free to set up a “designer" account. You can see the different fabrics here: http://www.spoonflower.com/spoonflower_fabrics#view_fabric A yard of fabric is right about $20, which yields a poster of approximately 36”x58” (exact dimensions vary slightly based on fabric type). I highly, highly recommend their performance knit - I carried my poster last year scrunched up in my bag and it looked PERFECT. It is a bit stretchy, so not great for things that need to be kept perfectly to scale (like geologic maps) but fully acceptable for most poster needs. I’ve had many colleagues use them now (in fact, I think Rama used them for his summer ESIP poster), and all have been quite happy with the results.

Shipping is usually around $3, but the turn-around is stated at about two weeks for that. They have two different levels of rush service - guaranteed delivery or rush delivery. Guaranteed delivery is $15 with delivery within 10 days (I got mine, both times I’ve used that, in much less than a week). Rush delivery (guaranteed delivery within 3 days) is only $25. So, a rush poster can be less than $50 if you do a single panel, or less than $70 for two (rush price is for the entire order).

Hope this helps! I am incredibly pleased with what I’ve done through them, and I’m happy to share this info with others because I want this company to continue to be around. Any questions, please feel free to contact me (dhills@gsa.state.al.us ).