Junior Achievement Sweetwater Room

While Working at Sweetwater Sound…

I was given the opportunity to design graphics for guitars that would appear in the local Junior Achievement building in their “Sweetwater Room”.

Sweetwater was looking to add some more decoration and interactive elements for the children that would visit this space.

These mockups serve the purpose of showing the relationship between the different guitars and their graphics. In this mockup I don’t like the way the red guitar shows more 3-dimensional space than the other two.
For this iteration I added more gradients to the blue guitar to add depth and played around with the idea of plotting out parts of the print so that the original guitar color would show through. I also played around with emulating texture through vector lines in the red guitar.
I chose my favorite combination and did a mockup of what they would look like in the final space.

After doing mockups…

I took all of the designs and did test prints. I did this so that I could compare the colors to the colors of the guitars and adjust my illustrator file. This also allowed me to see my designs at 100% scale and assess if they were the best choices.

Production and Application

After finalizing designs, it was time to print them out and start applying them to the guitars. Then to install them in the room!

Yellow Guitar Application

Using a squeegee, I started applying the vinyl to the top face of the guitar starting from the middle.
Blue Guitar Application

Using heat and stretching the vinyl I applied the vinyl to the top of the guitar paying extra attention to getting smooth edges around the curves.
Trimming Blue Guitar

After finishing the application, I trimmed out the cavities and the sides to show the original color of the guitar and the white binding.
Red Guitar Application

I applied the vinyl to the red guitar and used lots of heat from a blow torch to stretch the vinyl around the edges.
Final Assembly

After all of the applications were finished, I reassembled the guitars and gave them a final wipe down before transporting them.