The Facedown Decal what is it?

The term decal is the abbreviated form of the word decalcomania. The invention of taking artist rendering from canvas and printing these images onto a medium to decorate ceramic pieces attributed to Simon Francois Ravenet. Simon was from France, he was an engraver who immigrated to England, and after arriving in England circa 1750, he perfected this transfer process he called decalcomania.

In the 1950’s plastic substrates such as vinyl, Mylar’s, polyesters, Lexan, were coated with an adhesive and the pressure sensitive decal was invented. The white and yellow tinted vinyl is used to print decals using the screen printing process. To learn more about screen-printing read my post at http://www.decalfactory.com/wp-index.php/2009/12/  What are water slide-off decals?

There are two types of decals known in the screen-printing industry jargon as face-up and facedown decals. The facedown decals are printed on a clear substrate, such as clear Mylar or clear polyester. Polyester is the generic name of the brand name Mylar.

Clear polyester is manufactured also with a white adhesive, and is metalized to create silver and brushed polyester also known as chrome or brushed silver polyester. Clear polyester can also be metalized using a matte silver finishes and can be metalized to gold shinny surface or a gold-brushed finish. The history of metalized polyester I will discuss in another article.

Now back to the facedown decal, which is printed, on clear polyester with the graphics printed in reverse. Example of this if a decal design calls to print red, yellow and white the face-up decal would print the yellow and the red the white provided by the white vinyl. The facedown decal printed on clear polyester the yellow, red and white would be printed to create a white background for the other colors. Sometimes white is not used in the design of a facedown decal, and some facedown decals use white but only to outline the copy of the design thereby leaving the background of the decal clear.

When viewing the face-up decal the image is a positive image, the facedown decal is a reverse image only be rightly be viewed through the outside of a window. Because the facedown decal mounted on the inside of a window, this type of decal design is not very popular. Since most windows of cars, storefronts, or homes are highly tinted, the tinting mutes the facedown decal message, and therefore the intended message is not be seen easily.  

The facedown decal is widely used when printing static cling decals. Almost every static cling decal printed on clear static cling to be mounted on the inside of windows because on retail store window the decal mounted on the outside can be removed by anyone. The static cling mounted on the outside of a moving vehicle will blow off because of the wind created. Therefore, the facedown static decal is used to mount on the inside of the window.

Doug Bryant

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