Digital Printing Is Revolutionising Home Décor

Dyeing, Printing, Processing

Digital Printing Is Revolutionising Home Décor

Want to have a custom floor, wallpaper or curtain design in your house that's unique and perfectly suited to your taste? Even if your budget for this is minuscule? Digital printing, the same technology that the inkjet printer in your home office uses, is making this possible.

It is revolutionizing the textile, tile and wallpaper industries, and in the process opening up the world of custom design to anyone - you can now design these products yourself. It's no longer hugely expensive and you likely have the skill set required to design original work.

A deep knowledge of manufacturing techniques, dyes, fabrics, fibres, papers, glazes and inks - expertise that generally takes a professional designer years to acquire - is no longer a prerequisite.

You only need to know how to use a personal computer and how to upload your own original artwork or photographs onto a manufacturer's website. To customise a manufacturer's online offering, you just manipulate what appears on your computer screen. You communicate directly with the manufacturer, which fulfills the order within a few days or weeks.

Another plus with digital printing for home interior products: There is no minimum order required. You can order just enough fabric for drapes for one window, wallpaper for one wall, floor tiles for a front entry or material in even smaller quantities.

How can a modified version of the humble inkjet printer do all this?

Digital printing has transformed the traditional production process. With printed fabric, for example, you can replace a large manufacturing plant and multiple pieces of equipment with one very large digital inkjet printer about the size of an 8-foot cube in an area about the size of a three-car garage.

The printing process itself has been streamlined. You no longer need a separate run for each color, which made conventionally printed multicolored fabrics more costly; instead, all the colors can be printed at the same time. Because the printer calibrates the colors before the printing process begins, the manufacturer does not have to expend quantities of yardage just to get each color calibrated correctly.

How difficult is it to take advantage of these online opportunities?

You can design fabric (for US$ 17.50 to US$ 38 a yard) and wallpaper on spoonflower. com, a website that offers both of these options. It is not hard to create a simple, hand-drawn motif that was pleasing to the eyes and upload it to the site. The really hard part is creating a motif that is equally pleasing as it repeats across a wall or on a sofa, without cutting off heads in the wrong place or creating some other jarring visual.

The site shows how a proposed wallpaper pattern (US$5 to US$7.50 per lineal foot) would look in a room with furniture or, on its sister website, roostery.com, how a fabric pattern would look on a pillow or as a place mat.

A novice can eventually figure out how to make it all work, but for most people the easier path, by far, will be to customise a design that is already offered.

If you're more comfortable with fewer choices, minted.com (for US$32 to US$34 a yard) offers a limited menu.

For most of the nearly 600 fabric designs featured on the MintedHome section, you may change only one colour (usually the background), and the choices are usually limited to four or five. The site provides electronic previews for each color option and each application, including fabric-covered lampshades, throw pillows, table linens, drapes and yardage.

The preview of drapery as seen from across a room is especially informative, as many patterns look quite different when viewed from afar.

For the more adventurous, weaveup.com (for US$17.99 to US$39.99) offers nearly unlimited customisation options for its 10,000 fabric designs. Not only can you change as many as 12 colors in the same pattern, but each colour also can be any one of more than 1,600 that you select from a color wheel that appears on the screen with the pattern to be customised. It is possible to also increase or decrease the size of the repeat.