Aluminium

Focus on

It is safe to say that is the standard for the industry today, it is a versatile and pliant metal that when combined with heavy-duty plastics, create a great signage composite.

As well as the flexibility of the material, are a great substrate to place onto, as you can see here in the picture.

Archive for June, 2007, page 1

Adherence to COSHH Guidelines

Working in a sign business you wouldn’t think that you would be exposed to many dangerous chemicals or materials. You might be surprised though. It isn’t the case.

This was first highlighted when I looked for the information on our printing inks. You may know that inks are dissolved in a solvent, to keep them in a liquid form (many ‘inks’ are actually powdered pigments). The information was, I must say, easy to find and presented very clearly. The printed version was added to our binder.

That is not the only example of materials in the sign-making business that can be hazardous. We spray a lot of our materials and so the paints must be thinned out a little bit, so there are the thinners that the spayers must be careful of. Of course, they wear protective clothing, masks, and the booth is carefully designed to suck out any airborne particles that don’t get onto the material being sprayed (industrial air filtration).

The application fluid used in applying vinyls to signs isn’t water, and so we must also take that into account. The glue cleaner that we use, and the general cleaner too, must also have their information stored.

It goes without saying that people are warned of the dangers of some materials, and the obvious “don’t drink this”, “don’t inhale this” warnings prevail as well. Don’t forget that being a sign-maker we can easily whip up more warning signs, and there are plenty to read regarding the safety of materials.

If the worst does happen, there are lots of signs in the building showing the first aid guidelines, what to do, how to position the person and so on. They are very descriptive, very clear, easy to read and follow, and more importantly, big enough that you can’t miss them wherever you go. The water stations are positioned in strategic places, and there is a emergency procedures and safety sections in the company guidebook.

This style of sign belongs to the company,news,safety signs categories. Click on one of those links to see more kinds of articles like this one.

Natural Tendency of Standards is to Slip

Is the natural tendency of any standard for it to slip?

Assuming you start out by defining a set of standards that everyone should follow. If no manager or employee monitors the standards – is it the natural tendency for them to slip? Would a mark or two be accepted every so often where the standard calls for none? Perhaps a millimetre or two out is ‘acceptable’?

Naturally GRS is dedicated to maintaining strong and stringent standards for designing, manufacturing, printing, assembly and quality control. It’s not necessary to go into the nitty-gritty here in a blog post but let’s just say that from the moment a job comes in, the standards are applied to each step of the job. From where someone starts designing it, then printing, all the way to the actual assembly.

So it is up to each employee every step of the way to ensure that they performed the job correctly, and if something went wrong, to report it and write up why it went wrong. This for feedback into the quality control system so the standards can be reinforced, corrected if required, or updated if a step or procedure has changed.

This style of sign belongs to the company,news,politics categories. Click on one of those links to see more kinds of articles like this one.

Small Business Blog and Web 2.0

I think if I asked around work about Web 2.0 I would get a lot of stares and blank expressions. The reason? Because the term itself, while not misleading, isn’t exactly mainstream. You don’t hear ‘Web 2.0′ on gadget programs (at least here), and I haven’t seen a single television program dedicated to using the Internet.

It’s a bit of a collective term too, as if to encompass everything that is happening in the online world. AJAX, XHTML, CSS, Ruby-on-rails, you name it, the terms exist in multitudes but really only for those that use them, or interact with them on a daily basis. Even these aren’t really indicative of Web 2.0 as the term really encompasses far more, such as tag clouds, blogging, social bookmarking, podcasts etc.,

Running a small business, or a small business blog, has little or nothing to do with Web 2.0. Or does it?

At I think they’re more aware of the Internet only because of my own experiences. Sure, most people here have broadband or at least a connection to the Internet, but dealing with Web 2.0 is not a regular occurrence. No-one here, asides from myself, blogs, for example. The itself is kept current and we have found it useful as both a marketing tool and as a method to talk about sign-making but I doubt it would be thought of in any Web 2.0 terms.

We’re not about to jump into -style photo-sharing, or podcasting (although that might be a thought to consider, along with vodcasting), but I think that for the time being blogging will be the limit of any Web 2.0 interaction we dabble in.

Another indication of embracing Web 2.0 however, could be the adherence to Web Standards (XHTML & CSS) which I must say, the website and blog were both coded too. This is IMHO important for any website but moreso for a business not just to tout the benefits of having an up-to-date website and blog, but to keep that ‘on the cutting edge’ mentality that should be prevalent elsewhere in the business.

So all in all even though we have small amounts of Web 2.0 in our web effort, we do employ it. Even though it might not be seen or known, it’s there, which goes to show you that the integration of Web 2.0 into everyday use is seamless from previous ‘versions’ of the web.

This style of sign belongs to the company,design,news categories. Click on one of those links to see more kinds of articles like this one.

Computers & Thunderstorms

Even in this day and age with various pieces of protection from storms, we still watch over our computers very carefully. Yesterday a bad storm passed overhead, lots of thunder and lightning and as a precaution, we shut off all of our computers. The likelihood of a lightning strike causing damage is low of course, but it has happened before, so it is better to be safe than sorry.

Most of the computers have surge protection of course, but just in case we would rather be 10 minutes without a computer than several days fixing one.

Anyone else have any horror stories about storms causing damage to their computer systems?

This style of sign belongs to the company,news categories. Click on one of those links to see more kinds of articles like this one.