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Bar Runners are an essential part of any drinking establishment. Here at bar-mats.co.uk, we have made it easier to find and create the ideal bar runner for you.
We provide thousands of bar runners, of all shapes and sizes, to homes and businesses across the United Kingdom and around the world. Our streamlined process allows us to get from idea to item quickly and efficiently. Our easy-to-use online
customisation tools allow you to create and visualise your idea in real-time, and they give us a better understanding of what our customers need.
On this page, we will focus on the graphic design and pressing side of things - sharing our goals, process and results.
Whether you have a design idea of your own or need inspiration, bar-mats.co.uk makes it quick and easy to get started. We have provided a wide range of items that are available for personalisation and customisation - from simply entering a bar name using pre-selected fonts, to manually selecting or uploading your own images, text and colour schemes.
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Our customisation tools have been matched to individual products based on the level of complexity your design requires. The first tool allows for basic data entry into text fields, along with limited image manipulation.
[Image of Zepto]
The second tool allows for greater flexibility with regards to design - images and text can be scaled, flipped, rotated and manipulated using on-screen drag-and-drop functionality. Entire designs that have been created elsewhere can also be uploaded and edited to fit the item you have chosen from our catalogue.
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Once you have your idea to a point where you are happy to print, the ordering process is as you would expect from a traditional online ecommerce experience. Customer orders come through to us with a digital render of the idea you have provided, on top of the item you have chosen, with all of your images and text as separate entities. This allows our graphic designers to take a look at each project in detail to determine whether it is ready to enter the print preparation phase of the process, or if an issue has arisen: Is more information required? Are any of the images or text missing? Does anything we have received infringe on someone else’s copyright?
Images, text and instructions for orders created on bar-mats.co.uk are stored and made available for our team of on-site graphic designers, ready to be looked over and modified where necessary to create bespoke products for our customers and clients.
Once downloaded, ideas are carried over in whole or in part into our vector-based design software, where our high resolution print files are created. Vector-based artwork allows us to create higher quality end results. The higher the level of detail in a print file, the better the final pressed item tends to be.
[Image of general Affinity artboard]
All designs are measured carefully on screen, and a bleed area is added to make sure that they accurately fit their intended products.
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Different designs sometimes require different print methods. Some inks produce a better result for certain surfaces, some designs require a larger amount of paper in order to match the size of the item, and some items need to be printed with greater haste if they are many in quantity. As a result, artwork is readied for print based on our best printer for the job.
[Image of SCF-500]
Much like the varied printing methods, there are also varied prepping methods for the different items in the bar-mats.co.uk catalogue. For the most part, a lot of items take on moisture during their storage, and this can affect the quality of the print. As a result, a lot of our products need to go through a stage referred to as ‘pre-pressing’ - the process of applying heat to the printing surface for a short period of time in order to draw any residual water from the material.
Every print sheet needs to be trimmed down to an appropriate size once it has come out of the printer. Designs are printed as a mirror image so that the idea ends up the correct way around during the pressing process. The individual designs are stuck to the products prior to pressing, to help prevent design movement and double-prints occurring.
[Image/video of bar mat taped up prior to pressing]
Here at bar-mats.co.uk we use sublimation printing to create high quality, customised products for our customers. In order to activate the sublimation ink used in our designs and generate a reaction between the ink and the printing surface, we need to heat both to a minimum of 180 degrees Celsius. To do this, we have a collection of heat presses - each one tailored to a size or shape requirement of a product on our website.
[Image of [a] heat press(es)]
[Image/video of heat press in action]
Once cooled, we take a collection of photographs of every order and seal our orders in size-appropriate protective packaging, before sending items to their destinations across the United Kingdom and around the world!
Here is a small selection of some of the items we have created along the way...
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