It’s hard to say whether this sort of product will unleash a stream of creativity or a gushing torrent of poor taste. Dutch printing company ixxi has come up with an innovative, inexpensive and very nifty way to print and hang large scale artworks. By breaking the photo or design up into lots of smaller cards, which are later joined together for presentation using funky little plastic x and i shaped connectors, ixxi avoids the prohibitive expense of larger scale printing, as well as making it easy to package a wall-sized piece of art up into a small box. In fact, the same technology lets you visit an art gallery, and take a life size, photorealistic replica of your favorite wall fresco home with you, ready to reassemble and hang.
Just quietly, dear Gizmag readers, I occasionally fancy myself as a bit of a photographer. In fact, just last week I pulled out a bunch of my favorite snaps (including this one, which really nails the spirit of a mate and his wife) and got them printed on big 100 x 50 cm (39 x 19.7 in) canvas boards to hang on walls around the house.
Canvas prints and photo prints look great, but they’re fairly expensive – a problem that gets exponentially bigger with size. So on a reasonable budget, you might be able to get a couple of boards printed, but you’re up for quite a lot of money if you want to create a whole feature wall.
That’s where ixxi comes in – this Dutch company has created a very simple, classy system that lets you print any number of smallish cards, on a variety of media, then join them together to form larger artworks using i and x shaped connectors.