The company decided to create a large mosaic of one of the main characters, Jon Snow, in the lead up to the much-anticipated start of season six of the show, based on the best-selling novels of GRR Martin, due to air on 24 April.
It took 19 staff at the Rotherham, Yorkshire-based company nine-and-a-half hours to create a mosaic of character Jon Snow, in a process which was filmed and posted on YouTube.
Putting the mosaic together was just the end of a three- to four-week process. The idea was dreamt up by the creative and marketing teams, who decided to create business cards for 14 characters from the show,
The cards were designed in-house and then printed on an iGen 4 at the end at the end of March. All of the cards were assigned a code which matched spaces on a grid which staff printed on the company’s large-format printers. After the cards were guillotined, it was left to the mosaic team to match the 3,906 cards with the grid numbers, creating a 5.35x3.41m artwork.
Marketing manager Jon Smith said: “It was a collaborative effort to raise awareness of the brand and of the high quality of the print that we can produce.
“We were looking for something to jump on the back of that everybody will be talking about. Not everyone talks about print, much as we would love them to. We have some Game of Thrones fans here so it seemed like a good idea.
“The feedback from customers has been really good. We’ve had people ringing in about it. We are trying to share it with some Game of Thrones fan sites too."
It is not the first time the company has embarked on an unusual business card project. In November it decided to print the ‘world’s biggest business card’ and get into the record books.
It printed a giant version of e-commerce director James Kinsella’s business card on one of its HP Scitex 11000, in front of official Guinness World Record adjudicators.
Instantprint is part of Rotherham-based Bluetree Design & Print, which also includes trade W2P operation Route One. All three brands operate from a 9,290sqm site in Manvers, where it runs two HP Scitex 11000s, a B1 Heidelberg eight-colour perfector, a B2 Heidelberg XL 75 and a B2 Komori LS429 plus coater, alongside a Muller Martini bookletmaker and finishing equipment.
Bluetree recorded a £14.4m turnover in the financial year to 30 April 2015 and has 225 staff.
