Whether a big city, small town, giant corporation, or locally-owned business, usually the focus of branding is on fostering a sense of community and shared purpose. Saint John’s Parish In the community of Mitcham, Victoria, hosts an annual fete, as do many other not-for-profit organisations. For theirs, they requested a festival inflatable arch to frame the entrance to their elaborate yet humble celebration featuring contests, live and local music, and BBQ!
Here at Inflatable Anything, we love bringing these communities closer together in our own way, and we were delighted to work on this project!
A Warm Welcome
For this event, the client wanted a simple festival inflatable arch that would be bright, colourful, and above all, welcoming. As with many of the event arches we’ve created in the past, this one was to have areas on the legs where the client could advertise their event sponsors and space on the top bar to promote the event using detachable banners. Obviously, they knew they wanted the festival inflatable arch to be attention-grabbing, but they also wanted to make sure that the banners and shade of the blow up would complement each other. With some guidance from us, we came to an agreement on some very satisfactory solutions.
Beauty of Creation
The colour the client landed on was the cheerful, sunny stock yellow. However, since all they asked for was a coloured festival inflatable arch, there wasn’t much in the way of artwork to apply to the 3 metres wide by 3.4 metres high unit. The real work came into play when we had to design the detachable Velcro banners for them. Obviously we had to recreate the logos on the polyester panels, but first, we were also asked to help the religious entity freshen them up.
Some of the logos they had were poor quality and muddled, so we gladly helped them arrange to have the logos redrawn into a better format. This particular client was really laid-back and quite pleasant to work with, but even if they weren’t, it was the least we could do. With the logos recreated in high resolution, it was time to get on with business-as-usual!
When it came to printing out these revitalised logos, we first had to take the client’s renovated artwork and blow it up. This process was made much easier and much more pleasant-looking thanks to the redraw. To best capture the depth of colour in these drawings, for this sub-project we used CMYK inks on a digital printer. Although spot colour can generally get a more precise match to the original shade, CMYK can achieve a much wider range of colours. Since this was achieved on our digital printer, no time was wasted on letting the inks dry.
Something from Nothing
The festival inflatable arch was meant to have a simple shape; the client just wanted clean and straight lines throughout, with perfectly square corners. Typically arches achieve rigid shapes really well anyway, but we knew it would be even better if we chose the construction material with this in mind.
Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, is the superior material to use for quite a few of our projects depending on what kind of inflatable it is, and it was definitely best for this festival inflatable arch. PVC has a lot of toughness and mechanical strength to it, which makes for great units that call for more rigidity. As a construction material, it’s also extremely durable; fire-resistant; weather-resistant; abrasion-resistant; shock-resistant. That’s why it’s used in so many applications, from roofing to wire insulation to fashion and footwear.
The best quality of polyvinyl chloride for many projects, though, is just how lightweight and portable it is. Added up with everything else, we guarantee PVC inflatables can be reused event after event, year after year. In that vein, as with this festival inflatable arch, Inflatable Anything would be more than happy to provide any client with brand new detachable banners to keep up with changing themes, branding, and sponsors.
Judgment Day
Our products take anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks to ship once we’ve completed everything on our end, but by happy circumstance, the client was very local to our business, so we were able to directly deliver the festival inflatable arch after we finished our quality control protocols. This gave them plenty of time to get accustomed with the setup, break down, and storing process before the day of the event.
The Mitcham Community Fete has been continuing on for years, and has become one of the most popular fete celebrations in the eastern suburbs. If our work had anything to do with the success of the client’s annual festival, we consider that more than enough ammo to continue providing creative solutions and ace customer care to businesses around Australia.
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