LTLprints LAUNCHES BIG WALL GRAPHICS FROM LEADING ARTISTS + DESIGNERS
Philadelphia Startup Brings NEW ART to a NEW MEDIUM

August 10, 2009 - Philadelphia, PA – LTLprints, the ‘Larger Than Life Wall Graphics Company,’ announced today a global publishing and distribution partnership with the START SOMA ART GALLERY in San Francisco.

LTLprints will publish and distribute a collection of BIG WALL GRAPHICS, created by artists and designers curated by the START SOMA ART GALLERY.

http://www.LTLprints.com/start

Artists and designers featured in the launch of the Larger Than Life BIG WALL GRAPHICS catalog include Susan Kare, Justin Bua, VULCAN, Sugarluxe, Casey O’Connell, Felix LaFlamme, Tricia Choi, Mark Wasyl, Kelly Towles, Luke Feldman, Moses Norenberg, Matthew Porter, SAMALA, Martin Hsu, APEX, Fat Rabbit Farm, Gabe Marquez, Christian Wiseman, ARG Studios, and the Ice Cream Man.

“Larger Than Life Prints is honored to work with some of the world’s premier artists and designers to bring amazing new art to a revolutionary new medium,” according to Kendall Schoenrock, co-founder of  LTLprints.   “With the launch of our first curated BIG WALL GRAPHICS collection, we hope to transform empty walls everywhere with our giant removable and reusable wall graphics!”

ABOUT BIG WALL GRAPHICS

BIG WALL GRAPHICS are quite literally ‘larger-than-life’ (with customer-selected sizes ranging from twelve inches to seven feet tall!), and are printed with eco-solvent digital inks on a state-of-the-art self-adhesive fabric paper, Continue reading “LTLprints LAUNCHES BIG WALL GRAPHICS FROM LEADING ARTISTS + DESIGNERS”

As a part of the vibrant, ever growing, every changing Philly start-up community, Larger Than Life Prints is thrilled to be a sponsor of the Independents Hall / Mashable Mixer on May 1st!  We will be a part of some historic celebrating as Mashable brings their famous “Mashable Mixer” to Philadelphia for the first time and IndyHall celebrates the opening of their bigger and better new offices at 20 North 3rd Street.  

Here is a sneak peek of the sponsor wall.

So come on out and join us and the other sponsors as we help Mashable and IndyHall celebrate!

To make it easy, we are providing you the When, Where, How directly from IndyHall.

When, where, how?

Date: Friday, May 1st, 2009

Time: 8:00 pm Till Close (that’s 2:00 am for the out-of towners, or the non-party-goers)

Location: Cavanaugh’s River Deck, 417 N Columbus Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19123 (map)

Tickets: Open Admission, 21+ Only Please, but please register yourself on one of our Socialize Pages, so we know you’re coming

Socialize: Facebook , Meetup , Upcoming

Tags: Events, sponsorships

A few weeks ago, we received a call from Meg Havern from TicketLeap.com.  TicketLeap was looking for an easy and affordable way to have their logo displayed at the entrance to their Center City Philadelphia Offices.

This request made us smile for several reasons. First, Ticket Leap is an awesome company!  For those of you who may not have see their TechCrunch article, TicketLeap made inroads in the highly competitive event registration and ticketing software market by choosing to cater to small companies and events.  Ticketleap not only allows their clients to sell tickets online, but they offer box office solutions through the additional reporting and tracking services available on their website.   Second, TicketLeap shares our vision in beginning a start-up adventure here in Philadelphia.  Lastly, TicketLeap is comprised of a great team.  They recently landed Blake Jennelle as their Director of Marketing and have brought on several others that round out their already fantastic team!

Kendall decided to hand deliver their print since their headquarters is only blocks away from ours.  Within hours of receiving Meg’s phone call the TicketLeap crew was standing in their office admiring their Larger Than Life prints logo with pride.  Kendall was able to spend time with their CEO, Chris Stanchak discussing their most recent purchase.  Here is a video of Chris and his team finishing installation.

(This post brought to you by Gloria Bell on behalf of LTL Prints.  Please direct any questions to gloria@LTLprints.com)

Tags: Customers, Logo, Startup, Ticketleap

7:15 AM - Iphone alarm goes off.  I hit snooze…

7:27 - First read through of email, in bed, on my phone.

7:43 - Made it downstairs to the gym in my building.  Ran 2.6 miles and wailed on my shoulders, bi’s and tris.

8:49 - Fresh and Clean.  1st chat with Carsten regarding daily tasks and goals.

9:16 - Answerd most pressing emails while having breakfast at my desk.

9:24 - Left for Independents Hall to work for the day

9:50 - Settled in at IndyHall and snagged my first cup of coffee.  Spoke to Alex Hillman and David Spears about DreamIT and cool Philly momentum in the startup world.

11:09 - Answered 2 phone calls from headhunters regarding placing their people in a new job opening at LTLprints.

12:40 PM - Finished the first draft of the 1 pager proposal I’m writing for a meeting tomorrow with a local design firm.

1:32 - Snagged another cup of coffee not wanting to take lunch until my proposal is finished.

2:29 - Answered an inbound request for a custom quote.

2:58 - Almost done with the proposal.

3:12 - Sent the proposal to Gloria Bell for proof reading. She rocks at a ton of stuff, by the way.

3:22 - Snagged a slice of Pizza for lunch (negating the hard work on the treadmill this morning).

3:48 - Phone conversation with Carsten regarding production, my final proposal, the design competition, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Philly Startup Leaders Meetup, and updates on pleased customer feedback.

4:12 - Stopped to thank Gloria for her help and chatted up a some cool new peeps at IndyHall.

4:20 - Read through my twitter stream

4:29 - Setup an e-voting script for the upcoming design competition. It’s going to rock.

4:43 -  Worked with Dallas Shaw to get her designs into the catalog and entered into the design competition.

5:11 - Was invited to dinner at National Mechanics with Gloira Bell some of her friends.

5:39 - Ceaser Salad (due to the late lunch).

6:35 - Left to attend Philly Startup Leaders.  We wanted to be there early as Gloria volunteered to help with sign in.  Did I mention she rocks?

7:15 - Philly Startup Leaders starts cranking and I meet a ton of interesting people.

9:07 - I left a little ealry as I was pretty tired and I wanted to walk home. It’s unusually warm in Philly tonight.

10:15 - Day recap with Carsten and discussing key events for tomorrow.

10:49 - Checked email

11:43 - Wrote blog post while watching a rerun of the witty show The West Wing.

12:14 AM - Contemplated if this post sums up how much I enjoy what I’m doing.

Goodnight all.

Tags: Carsten Petzold, Gloria Bell, IndyHall, IPhone, Online Communities, Philly, Philly Startup Leaders, Startup, West Wing

When we launched LTLprints.com we made it a priority to cultivate a community of designers - they will help bring core content to our catalog and customers.  One of the ways we are starting to do that is visiting highly passionate students at local Philadelphia art schools.  Earlier today we visited the Art Institute of Philadelphia (only 2 blocks away from our headquarters) and spoke to a number of impressive up and coming rock stars regarding the launch of the first ever LTLprints design competition.

We invited them to join our design competition and we would like to extend the same offer to you. Over the next four weeks we will take submissions to our online catalog - along the way stopping to smell the roses and meet you, the designers, through an interview on this blog.

Here is how it works;

• Create your free LTLprints account
• Use those creative genes to come up with any design that would make for a great wall print
  (art work, pictures, collages, shillouettes, etc…).
• Upload a .jpg of your artwork and let us know that you would like it to be entered for the competition.

How to compete:

• Send you Vector or Photoshop file to designcompetition [@] LTLprints.com
• We want to meet you.  Send us a short bio and any links to your other online work.
• Submissions must be received by Monday, February 23.

Who is the Jury?

• The community, silly.   In a few weeks we will open up a voting system for submitted designs and you (and your friends, mom & dad, your coworkers, whomever you want) can come rate thumbs up on designs, the one with the most thumbs up wins.  Pretty simple, right?  Get your facebook groups ready!

What is in it for you?

• The winner(s) gets his or her designs printed for free!
  1st place: Free 7ft large  (84”x52”)
  2nd: 5ft (60”x38”)
  3rd: 3ft (38”x24”)
• Get exposure - we will try to feature every competing designer on this blog and we will do our duty to introduce you to our customers.  We pinky swear.
• Bulk the resume!  We realize that not everyone competing is a student, but if you are, this is a great event to point to in those future interviews.
• Oh, and don’t forget that you get to set your own design price associated with your work.  The design price is what a customer will pay you when they buy your print.  This is a value set by you, but most of our designers are pricing their work between $1 and $10.
• The joy of helping a hard working startup get off the ground.  That’s worth something right?  Kama points or something… We’re sure of it!
• A free beer at a Philadelphia pub of your choosing. Mmm. Beer.

When?

• Submit your items latest by February 22, 11:59pm EST
• Voting will end on March 8th.
• Winners will be notified on this blog.

Questions?

• We are here to help.  Leave any unanswered questions in the comment box below.
• Or just contact us.

We’re super excited to get things rolling.  We hope you are too!

UPDATE:  Download this bio template and introduce yourself to the crowd.

Tags: Adobe Photoshop, Art Institute of Philadelphia, competition, Design, Designer, Facebook

Last week LTLprints offered a free print to the community.  (We will try to do this about once a month to stay tuned.)  It is with great pleasure to announce the winner of the first free print giveaway.  As suggested by Gloria Bell via twitter, “@phltwestival could use a free sign for our fundraising event. http://philadelphia.twestival.com” and we gleefully agreed.

So what is a Twestival and what is the phltwestival?  From their press release,

On Thursday, 12 February 2009, for 24 hours, cities around the world will be hosting “Twestivals”, volunteer-run, fundraising meet-ups for people who know each other through the micro-blogging service twitter.com, to bring Twitter communities together in the spirit of fun and for a good cause.

They are raising money for a cause that I am personally interested in; charity: water, a not-for-profit bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Anything that supports the Millennium Development Goals gets a thumbs up from us!

The phltwestival will take place at the Get Happy Pub, 509-511 South 2nd Street and we hope to see you there.  Big kudos to Melissa Thiessen and Gloria Bell who are co-founders of the Philadelphia event.  LTLprints is proud to be apart of such a great event and we are pleased to provided our services to such an honorable example of communities uniting to server the greater good.

To find out more about Twestival and to see the full list of cities participating, go to the official event website at www.twestival.com or follow @twestival on Twitter.

As always, feedback is welcome.  What do you think about twestival and / or our decision to support this project?

Tags: Drinking water, Gloria Bell, Melissa Thiessen, Micro-blogging, Millennium Development Goals, Philadelphia, Twestival, twitter

Today Carsten and I wanted to reveal a fun fact about ourselves that you might not know.  Checkout this video and then leave a comment about your Friday Fun Fact that we don’t know!  Have a great weekend!

This video was a little longer and so I chopped it down.  Enjoy!

Our last post on thinking differently received some great comments.  Thank you!  We love having a conversation with you.

As a Philadelphia based company, LTLprints is thrilled when other startups in our area have success. This past Friday, DuckDuckGo.com, a new company focused on making it easier to find the stuff you are searching for online, was featured on TechCrunch. TechCrunch, for those of you who don’t live in our startup tech world, is a technology behemoth blog with millions of readers and companies mentioned there usually get a massive spike in traffic, affectionately known as “being TechCrunched.”

I first met Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, at BarCampPhilly a few weeks ago (we made LTLprints for bcp08). I was also able to catch his fishbowl presentation at Philadelphia’s FounderFactory (we printed the name badges and signs for FF08).

Kudos also to Gabriel for diving into the mob over at TechCrunch. I’ve found that the people who sit on the sidelines love to throw darts and they have little understanding of the difficulty that goes into bringing a company from the whiteboard to fruition. You can tell that he’s passionate about his project and that goes very far with us. I’d love to see more founders take such a transparent role in building their company.

So take a moment to watch this video, then follow Gabriel’s twitter stream @yegg and @duckduckgo. Then come back and leave us a comment on what you think about DuckDuckGo and on Gabriel’s Philly startup passion.

Rock on Philly - something good is brewing here.

Make sure you’re catching all the Larger Than Life action by following us on twitter! @LTLprints, @schoenrock, @cpeLTLprints

Tags: BarCampPhilly, cpeLTLprints, Duck Duck Go, DuckDuckGo.com, Founder Factory, FounderFactory, Gabriel Weinberg, Kendall Schoenrock, Larger than Life, Larger Than Life Prints, LTL Prints, LTLprints, Philadelphia, Philly, Schoenrock, Tech Crunch, TechCrunch, yegg