A Googly Eye Scavenger Hunt at the Van Aken District for Akron Children's Hospital

Akron Children's Hospital was opening a new location near the Van Aken District in Shaker Heights. The campaign announcing it did not go on the new building. It went into the district, because that is where the families most likely to use the new location already were.

Van Aken is retail and food — coffee shops, restaurants, places to sit and talk on a Saturday morning. DG Creativ designed, produced and installed the whole activation, printed pieces included.

What went in

• Two 52-inch diameter googly eyes, printed on BrickWrap and installed on textured brick in the district. Large-format and high up, so they read from across the plaza.
• Forty sets of smaller googly eyes placed through the district at child height — on glass, painted surfaces and interior walls — as the stops on a scavenger hunt.
• 3,750 printed cup sleeves carrying Akron Children's branding and a pair of googly eyes with blank space underneath, so a child could draw their own face on the sleeve. Finishing the hunt earned a free hot chocolate and one of the sleeves.

Why brick decided the material

Standard wall vinyl does not hold on masonry. Brick, concrete and stucco are porous, irregular and low-energy, and an ordinary adhesive lifts at the edges within weeks. The large graphics went on in a textured-surface film built for low-energy substrates, worked down into the mortar lines during installation so the print follows the face of the wall rather than bridging across it.

The second half of the specification was removal. This was a campaign on buildings belonging to the district, and it had to come off cleanly at the end. High tack and clean removal pull against each other, so how long the graphics needed to stay up was settled before anything was printed.

Why one supplier for three different jobs

The wall graphics, the forty small placements and the cup sleeves are three separate production problems — different presses, different materials, different finishing. None of the three would have carried the campaign on its own, and splitting them across three suppliers would have meant three schedules on one immovable opening date.

Planning something similar?

Four things decide the quote: what the surfaces actually are, how long it needs to stay up, whether it has to come off cleanly, and whether there are printed pieces on the same deadline. Tell us those and we will tell you what it takes.

The full Van Aken District write-up · Sign company in Shaker Heights · Three years of graphics for Akron Children's Hospital · Request a quote or call 330.968.0678.