Genie Industries - Control Panel Overlay
This is one of THOUSANDS of parts that I have created for Genie Industries and at least 40 other equipment manufacturers. Not this exact part, of course, but similar materials and setups for many other customers.
I don't know exactly what particular piece of equipment that this control panel goes to but it's obviously something with an arm and a bucket. Not a scissor lift, but something with a lift like a bucket truck.
Control panels like this are printed on 10 mil Velvet Polycarbonate which is a clear, somewhat flexible (but not stretchable) material with a fine to mid-grain texture (so it's not smooth). It would be printed with a technique called "sub-surface printing" which means the ink is coated on the back side of the material. This is important because the texture is only on the "front" side, the back side is smooth so it should take the ink just fine.
This is what the color plates and the die lines would look like when separated from the Composite artwork. Each one of these images represents a color plate (with the exception of the Cookie Cut plate which is used to make the die to cut the polycarbonate.
In this case, the Pantone Process Yellow, Pantone Process Blue, or the Pantone 3415 Green would go on first (doesn't matter which of them, but all three would be printed before the Black ink), followed by the Black ink. Notice that the Opaque White icons knock out of the Black ink so you can see the Opaque White ink on the bottom layer. Finally the flood coat of Opaque White ink goes on last. Some clear materials will actually use an Opaque White Adhesive which would cut down on your ink usage but it depended on the material and the ultimate application of the final product. After all the printing is done, the adhesive is applied (in this case a 3M 467MP which is a permanent, pressure-sensitive adhesive) along with the backer material (the brown paper with all the "3M 467MP" printed in green all over it).
Now the polycarbonate sheet is sent to the die cutter. In this case, there are no Kiss Cuts (which are cuts through the material and adhesive, but not the liner) and they are all instead Cookie Cuts (which are cuts through the material, adhesive, and the liner, cut to shape like a cookie). Quite a lengthy process!
The design work can be a challenge, making sure all of the icons and graphics fit national or international standards (unless they were custom images). We had to set all the type, which isn't difficult either, but we had to do that for often a dozen languages (if no sample to reference, this was done via a translation service) as the manufacturers would produce the same machine for multiple different countries. Most critical of all the steps would be reproducing the cut outs to the precise dimensions to fit the physical control panel on the machine. My team had to measure each hole, corner radius, and its placement and detail all of these dimensions on an engineering document.
I just noticed that I created this document just over 12 years ago and I don't see a corner radius noted on the rectangular cut outs...can't believe I left that off...
Some customers provided their own internal document with specs and dimensions along with a sample (if it was an existing part). Quite often these drawings were decades old and an even larger portion of them were hand drawn and older than myself. Most of the time we only had a sample of an existing label that they pulled from a machine so we could recreate it based on that sample. It was critical that these dimensions were accurate or the label simply would not fit. A bad die cost thousands of dollars to retool, not to mention the materials and the ink cost to reprint and taking the press away from running other jobs.
I'm sure that many of these dimensions may come out to a more "round" number if done in metric. We often noted dimensions in both Standard & Metric on our engineering document if the customer required it. This manufacturer wanted dimensions noted in Standard only.
We were a dedicated team that designed things like this (and things that are even more complicated) on a daily basis. Often we did 3-6 designs of complexity like this in a day along with a smattering of more normal labels. Most of our basic design jobs took an hour or so while some control panels took days due to their complexity of both graphics, detailing the engineering and the manufacturing process, and complexity of the die cuts.
I really learned a lot on this job about manufacturing that has served me well over my career and helped me on other projects decades later using other machines and processes. I miss my team very much as we were a close-knit group who helped that company make millions of dollars. We designed probably close to a million or more individual label designs for hundreds of customers over my 14 years at that employer. And that's just labels, not counting marketing, booklets, medical forms, and much more.
None of us were engineers, but we had to have the knowledge of an engineer without the certifications nor the pay to match. They paid us bottom-of-the-barrel wages for the work that we did.
