Opus worked with Tufts Health Plan on a mural design for their offices in Watertown. The installation we designed is made up of 35 “tiles” or individual graphics stretching almost 20 feet and includes titles such as “What We Believe,” “How We Support Members”, and “How We Live It.” As a whole, it demonstrates the organization’s mission and the proof that they live their values.
Many of the tiles include infographics describing information such as:
- achievements in health care
- hours spent in community service
- ethnic diversity
- energy efficiency
Designing to scale
Emily began the design in November 2018. The mural design was supposed to be about 12 feet. This seemed like a good size when we started the project. After the holidays, things started to pick back up with some back and forth on the data, but overall things were moving smoothly.
While all of this was happening, construction was going on at the site. One day when I went to visit the space I saw that the old doorway and hall entrance were sheet-rocked and our corridor was twice as long as planned. Our mural was no longer to scale! Luckily the client had no shortage of data. We added more infographics, recomposed the arrangement, and now we have an installation fully in scale with the environment.
Testing print quality
During the project, we worked with a few local printers to see their oversized printing capabilities. We had two companies print the same samples of our mural design for us to compare. One vendor’s prints were shiny and the color was rather dull. The other vendor produced a matte finish and rich color that work better for a display to minimize reflection. The relatively small investment to do this exercise made a big difference in quality.
Sweat the small stuff
Krysten and Kim also helped during the design phase. Kim, especially, near the end sweat out the details of marking tiny guide measurements for drilling holes for the stand-offs and preparing the artwork for press.
The take away from this project was that no detail was too small to measure twice and test again!
