Fringe by the Sea is a fantastic and highly successful music and arts festival which attracted nearly 60,000 visitors in 2022 and generated £6.4m for the local economy. It features over 200 performances across 4 stages including big name bands and celebrities.

We have partnered Fringe by the Sea for the 2021 and 2022 festivals (and will continue for 2023), producing a the majority of the signage and printed media for the event and also for the caterers, bars and traders that attend the festival. This year our challenges included producing 4m tall banner ‘socks’ to wrap the support structures inside the big top to prevent people climbing and building mobile advertising trailers.

We produced a wide range of products for the festival including…

We already knew that our wrapping can stand up to a lot of abuse, but now we know it can spend 36 days crossing the Atlantic Ocean through 40 foot waves and ocean storms without any damage!

Our Senior Designer Ian was part of five-man Scottish crew “Five in a Row” who competed in the 2021 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge – billed as the toughest rowing race in the world. They rowed for 36 days 3 hours and 33 minutes from La Gomera in the Canary Islands to Antigua in the Caribbean to take third place in a fleet of 36 boats.

Signman supported the team with a full range of marketing and promotional products, including flyers, sponsorship packs, banners, embroidered caps and tshirts, and even branded stickers for their rowing machines.

We also printed and applied a full wrap for the boat, including individually cut sponsor logos for the hull, oar blades and cabins. The Bow cabin was wrapped with the official race livery and the Stern cabin which contained all the electronics and navigation equipment was wrapped with a highly reflective chrome vinyl to reduce heat build up from the sun. The main design of a highly coloured DNA helix was a nod to the genetic disorder charity which the team raised funds for.

It’s the first time we’ve wrapped an ocean rowing boat and it looked fantastic, being hailed as one of the most colourful and recognisible boats in the race fleet, and we are proud to have been a part of a campaign that has raised over £150,000 for their chosen charity.

Matthew came to us for a full branding package for his new company Rox Electrical. Initially we worked with him to create a logo for the business and then used that logo to a create business cards, workwear, flyers, vehicle livery and a shortly a website for him. Having continuity across your marketing products and advertising is really important for building your brand identity and since we’re able to offer a one-stop-shop

The photos below show a shortlist of some of the logo concepts that we created for the brand and the final logo on some of the products we have produced for Rox. We’re really pleased with the half-wrap on his van using a matt black vinyl, which looks extremely smart and really makes the vinyl lettering pop.

Our Garment Printing and Embroidery arm Signman Embroidery converted the logo into a stitch pattern and embroidered and printed a range of workwear items for Matthew so he’s promoting the company wherever he goes. We supplied all of the garments and used a number of print options to suit each one.

We were given the task of replacing the wrap on a promotional trailer owned by Berwickshire Marine Reserve – the first voluntary Marine Reserve in Scotland. The old wrap was fading, discoloured and in a bad state of repair, and we felt the design needed updating to make full use of our printer’s capabilities and give the trailer more of a Wow factor.

The client wanted to include elements of cliffs and seabirds, the rich diversity of sea-life below, and the human activities that take place both in and on the water. Our designer used Photoshop, over 70 stock photo elements and all the tricks in his book to build an image that straddles above and below the waves to showcase the diversity of the area as well as leaving room for branding elements.

The approved design was printed onto a high quality vinyl which we UV laminated for protection outdoors and applied to the newly stripped trailer body. We were really happy with the result – the photoshopped image looks even better in the flesh, the colours really pop, and every time you look at it you spot a new detail or sea creature.