How to use WallArt to unleash customer creativity

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Carlos Guerrero, Web Product Manager at HP Large Format Printing, on integrating HP Application Center design tools into printers’ websites for bespoke interior design.

HP’s Application Center comes in two versions: a public design poster version called Application Center Lite and the Application Center Pro version, for those printers who want to integrate our design tools in their website and help bring in new customers. You can then receive print-ready PDF files according to your specifications from your customers and provide them with installation instructions and order confirmation. Any print provider who buys from the HP Latex or HP Designjet Z series portfolio can access the Application Center platform, signing in with the printer serial number. And any user or homeowner can access Application Center Lite and start designing their own poster – no graphic design experience required – with an extremely simple and easy interface. HP Application Center has two powerful suites of cloud-based design tools that any printer can easily integrate into their web pages: WallArt and Signage. Both have been designed to drive new growth areas to our printers. There is plenty of design software in the market that provides a single application. However, at HP Application Center we have more than 16 large format applications with an easy design experience that’s also easily integrated into your website. It also helps to create and print directly to your HP large format printer with HP Click printing software, and you can integrate it into your RIP software workflow with ease, managing production efficiently with automatic, reliable print-ready PDF generation and tools that help you manage orders and save time.

Designing and generating a large format application is rarely simple. Customers must often wrestle with complex files and spend a lot of time ensuring they get the right output. With Application Center, no graphic design experience is required to produce beautiful high-resolution posters in minutes. Not all customers are professional designers. With Application Center, customers can customise their own creations or choose from professionally designed templates or millions of free and premium photos, vector graphics or pattern designs (HP, Unsplash, Dreamstime, Instagram and Pattern Design). Customers can add photos, shapes, arrows, signs, texts or backgrounds to any design they are considering and customise it to their own preferences. Printers are constantly looking for areas of growth, new applications and profit pools, and it falls within our scope to help them capture these opportunities. HP Application Center is a key element that is constantly updated with new ideas and new products that you can offer to your customers. For example, we recently launched a face mask design tool and uploaded many new assets of COVID signage. These have been used by our printers to respond quickly to their customers’ demands over the last months.

Customers may wish to decorate each wall differently. In fact, this is quite a common practice. What does need to work better is to be able to apply one design to all the selected walls rather than one at a time.  At the moment, the design does not stitch together from one wall to another. If you scale one image on one wall, it is difficult to then scale the same image on a second wall to exactly the same scale as the first one. This might cause a mismatch when trying to align the two patterns.