I need a large map printed – probably 12 foot by 6 foot – can anyone recommend a company than could print it?

We need to be able to write on it with markers and it needs to be robust enough for a lot of people leaning on it as it gets annotated.

If you have a local outdoor shop, ours in Glasgow is Tiso Outdoor, they have a map printing service with a large plotter, I think you can get it done in waterproof material too.

I've never done a 'robust' print but I'd talk to Pyramid Imaging in Edinburgh and Loxley Colour in Glasgow for this kind of thing. Both are very helpful.

scottyjohn – Premier Member
If you have a local outdoor shop, ours in Glasgow is Tiso Outdoor, they have a map printing service with a large plotter, I think you can get it done in waterproof material too.

Should have said we'd supply the image.

I'd suggest a solvent print to vinyl that's then mounted to board – or depending on your budget, a good quality UV print direct to a foamboard or dibond (the latter would be massively robust). You can then maybe write on it with dry wipe pens?

Laminating at that size could be quite dear, so an unlaminated solvent print will be the most robust option. If you can keep the width to 5ft or just over, rather than 6ft, it opens up a lot more digital printers. Where are you based? PM me if you want as I have a whole host of contacts I could find for you.

Should have said we'd supply the image.

Also make sure the image can be blown up to that size the amount of clients who give me tiny internet images and expect a top notch job is laughable.

gonetothehills – ygm

tails – Member
Should have said we'd supply the image.
Also make sure the image can be blown up to that size the amount of clients who give me tiny internet images and expect a top notch job is laughable.

I can sympathise. I have colleagues who assume all pictures are scaleable to whatever they want.

tails is absolutely spot on. You're ideally going to need the map to be a vector file (EPS, native AI) that will scale infinitely. A bitmap image (JPEG / TIFF etc) will need to be pretty substantial to work at that kind of finished size.

Don't worry, i'll be using a vector map from digimap and editing it in Illustrator. Our department has just bought a nice new Mac Pro so i can do stuff like this.