Nestled in Portland, Maine, a working port city gorgeously set on a peninsula extending into Casco Bay, is a digital surface imaging studio and facility producing some of the wildest, digitally superior materials we’ve seen.

Textile company Designtex sees this facility as a creative genius laboratory of sorts – a place where its designers and craftsmen, and all creative team members, get to experiment with pushing through digital printing boundaries. Before being acquired by Designtex in 2011, the 26,000 square foot facility enjoyed a long, fruitful history as Portland Color. Designtex began working with Portland Color in 2008, and immediately saw its potential to help Designtex do what it does best.
Officeinsight ventured up to Portland in person to visit Designtex and to check out its surface imaging facility, filled to the brim with digital and laser printing presses and countless other machines. Designtex, the surface imaging studio, and the city of Portland, played gracious host and gave us a close-up view of ‘who’ Designtex really is.

Designtex President Susan Lyons, who served as creative director for many years and returned to the company as president in 2012 after a 10-year hiatus, tells me you can find Designtex’s soul at the intersection between utility and beauty, science and art. The utility/science part of the Designtex identity is grounded in a love of functionality, of solving problems in beautiful ways.
“We’ve always had a strong sense of problem solving, and of thinking about how we can use a textile or material to solve a specific issue,” says Ms. Lyons. “Textiles are our history, it’s where we come from, and it’s our first love. But, we now see ourselves as a materials company, too.”
Moving into a “materials” space is an important distinction to make.
“Architects and designers are interested in new solutions to different types of problems,” noted Ms. Lyons. “Sometimes those problems can’t be solved simply with textiles. The world of materials has become so interesting that we feel that’s where we can make a great impact.”
Designtex’s goal is to use printing as more than just a branding tool; it wants to use digital printing to give people and companies opportunities to tell their story in new ways.

“Our digital surfacing facility is such a powerful tool for communication, certainly from a visual point of view,” says Ms. Lyons. “But from a storytelling perspective, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible in applying digital technology to materials.”
“We want to keep the joy, while filling in the missing experiences.”
Applying digital assets to textiles is more than just slightly complex. Digital clarity comes in miniscule increments that can add up to fantastic clarity levels when executed well. There are some insanely cool machines that make Designtex’s digitally printed materials possible, but those machines need people with an incredible understanding of those digital assets to make them a reality. And Designtex has those people.
“It requires people who are thinking, ‘How good can this be?’ rather than, ‘How good does this need to be?’” says David Siegel, director of Surface Imaging at Designtex.
Designtex organizes its digitally printed products into a toolkit of four programs.
First, its Bespoke program is a complete tailoring experience for architects and designers who want a fully custom solution that pulls together “the client’s ideas, graphics, logos and imagery with our design, sourcing, curation, color management, printing and fabrication expertise, guiding each project from conception to production.”

“Each design responds directly to the client’s requirements and is gradually refined through multiple ‘fittings’ and adjustments, to achieve the perfect fit between the seed of a project and its realization.”
Next, the Portfolio is a program that “provides an exclusive gallery of artistic assets, well suited for large-scale printing with aesthetic and technical qualities that exceed standard stock imagery, and an extensive range of customizable features including a broad selection of substrates…The Portfolio program offers an haute couture collection of custom-fitted art pieces.”
In essence, the Portfolio is a smarter alternative to working with stock images, which designers typically end up wasting a lot of time and money on because many stock images weren’t created for large-scale digital printing.

“Stock images are not intended for environments, and there are usually issues with the level of resolution,” said Mr. Siegel. “The image Portfolio helps streamline that process for designers because all the thinking has already been done.”
The Designtex creative services team, led by Designtex artist and designer Karen Gelardi, works to cultivate close relationships with a network of talented artists showing in galleries around the world, whose work will be included in the Designtex image Portfolio. Ms. Gelardi notes that these collaborative relationships are beneficial to everyone involved.
“Artists are eager to play with our materials,” says Ms. Gelardi. “They’re excited by the possibility of people experiencing an artist’s work in a different way. Some content can act very differently on different scales and materials.”
Designtex rigorously manages the use rights for images in the Portfolio – another thing designers don’t have to worry about.

“Some artists say, ‘Do whatever,’” says Ms. Gelardi. “And some say they only want it used in specific ways. It’s a dialogue that holds true to the artist’s identity and maintains the magic of the artist’s work in our materials.”
Designtex’s newest program is Made to Measure, a tool consisting of collections of standard products that are customizable to a degree.
“Partnering with leading artists, illustrators, and photographers, the Made Measure program offers a diverse selection of original designs for wallcovering drops that can be individualized via a carefully formulated set of customization options.”
Think of Nike’s NikeiD, but with textiles instead of shoes, and designers instead of kick game obsessives.

“Made to Measure is our way of being able to share the fun,” says Mr. Siegel. “It lets you play with density, color and scale, and use different versions of similar patterns.”
“We’re finding that designers are looking for a lot of textural and decorative images and patterns, rather than just art, so that’s where we’re going to expand our offerings.”
Made to Measure has its own website that designers can go to (designtexmadetomeasure.com) and browse through available products. After choosing a graphic, the designer then chooses a panel height and layout options for each panel, which include being able to slide, drag and drop, rotate and flip the graphics however they want.
Once the imaging is ready to go, the designer can then export the image as a PDF, which can be dropped into a rendering. The PDF also serves as the order form, which the designer can send to Designtex when they’re happy with the design and ready to place the order. If a designer needs to make changes that involve more advanced customization, they can send it to their Designtex rep for help.

Made to Measure is new – it launched only six months ago – and Designtex plans to double the amount of available imagery within the next couple of months, followed by regular updates every 6-8 weeks moving forward.
And lastly, Designtex’s By The Yard (BYD) program includes the company’s standard line, ready-made collections of wallcovering and fabrics, priced by the yard.
Taken together, these four programs – Bespoke, Portfolio, Made to Measure, and By the Yard – allow designers to have an intimate part of the making process, while getting support from the Designtex team where needed. Designers can start initially with something simple, and then dial it up to a more custom solution if they want. And if a designer has time constraints, or has a lower comfort level in working with art prints, Designtex can step in with expertise.
“We wanted to build a toolkit for creativity that allows people to enter the process at different points, where we provide support on a sliding scale of involvement,” says Ms. Lyons.
“We want to focus on the notion of co-creation versus curation, which is an older notion. The landscape we see forming is now more about exploration together, as opposed to one body saying something is good.”