Benchmark Imaging & Display | Chicago Church of Christ | Cook Associates, Inc.

Creative and Technological Direction

Benchmark is a full service Imaging and Display large format printing and production house headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Benchmark is a one-stop shop business-to-business and business-to-consumer resource for tradeshow displays, convention displays, convention and expo graphics, retail store displays, signs and banners.

Marketing and Advertising

The challenge with designing imaging and messaging for Benchmark is the vast amount and variety of products produced for tradeshow display. Finding an image that would be remembered year after year by people attending trade-show trade shows so that your brand is remembered and interest is created enough to make someone at the least want to take a look at your website and marketing materials. We designed the water theme based on a 3D design create by Shaun McNicholas, done combining elements from other printed marketing materials. The elements in the trade-show display reflect elements in all of the printed marketing materials so that the imaging would be consistent across all materials marketing the brand. The 3-Dimentional imaging was used to draw attention to the new 3-Dimentional printing capabilities  afforded by the lenticular imaging technologies under development as a new product line; the bright colors used throughout Benchmark’s brand are specifically used to draw attention to the consistency of color management that Benchmark specialized in spanning all types of printing materials.

Infrastructure Management

When I started working with Benchmark the method in place for moving the large graphics files between their Macintosh computer systems to the printing systems was hot-swappable hard drives. Pre-press production work was done on the Macintosh computers. Printing work was done on a variety of printing systems, from output to film for final print on photographic panels to direct inkjet output using large format inkjet printing systems. In most cases these files would be several hundred megabytes in size making it challenging to move files from one system to another considering that networking between systems was a fairly new concept and ethernet based networks were still in their infancy in the ’80s. The solution was to design and build an ethernet based communication structure where files could easily be transferred between systems. The challenge, all graphics production and pre-press work is done on the Apple Macintosh systems, inkjet systems run on Windows based systems, and direct film imaging is done on Unix based systems. The solution was a mixture of communications protocols and standards driven by an Apple IP 6 based network.