Imagine running your hands across the terrain of western Tanzania — the ridgelines, the river valleys, the edges where protected forest meets grassland — without ever leaving Seattle.
That’s what visitors do every day at a renowned local conservation institution’s new exhibit. And the thing they’re touching? We built that.
The institution was building out a new exhibit space and needed a centerpiece that would stop visitors in their tracks — a large-scale 3D topographic map depicting a real conservation region in western Tanzania.
50+ villages with 15,000 people living sustainably alongside wildlife, color-coded zones for protected areas, livelihood areas, buffer zones, grasslands, rivers, and marine zones. All of it printed directly onto wood, with the natural grain showing through in unprinted areas to carry the forest aesthetic of the exhibit.
The finished piece needed to sit on a tabletop where visitors interact with it daily. Not behind glass. Not roped off. Hands on it. Built for real visitors to have a real, interactive experience — , not just something they glance at and walk past.
36 inches by 63 inches. Seventeen layers of quarter-inch plywood. Every layer intricately cut, full-color printed, hand-finished, and assembled into a single cohesive piece. The kind of brief that makes our team’s eyes light up.
Invisible Engineering: A Project Won or Lost in Pre-Production
The design files for each of the 17 elevation layers were solid — the cartography, the color system, the land-use zones were all well thought out. Our job was to take that vision and engineer it for the real world — which meant solving a dozen production challenges before a single layer hit the press.
You can’t glue what’s been printed. Every layer in this map is printed edge-to-edge with detailed, full-color graphics. But glue doesn’t bond well to ink — it needs raw wood. So we mapped every single layer overlap and strategically removed print from hidden zones to create clean adhesion surfaces. It’s the kind of invisible engineering that nobody sees in the finished piece, but it’s the reason the whole thing holds together.
Seventeen layers don’t just line up on their own. Stack seventeen intricately cut plywood shapes on top of each other and try to get them all to land perfectly. They won’t — not without a system. We engineered indexing holes across every layer — precision-placed alignment pegs that guaranteed each layer registered correctly to the one below it. It’s the difference between a map that looks right and one that actually is right.
We nested every part for material efficiency. Seventeen layers of custom-cut plywood across a piece this size is a lot of material — and a lot of potential waste if you’re not intentional about layout. We optimized the nesting of every part to get the most out of every sheet, keeping costs controlled without compromising a single cut line.
Then came the hand work. The intricate, organic cut lines of a topographic map leave rough edges and burrs on every perimeter. Our team hand-sanded every cut edge across all 17 layers. With shapes this detailed — we’re talking about the jagged contour lines of actual African terrain — that’s hours of meticulous finishing. It’s what makes the difference between something that looks fabricated and something that feels like a finished exhibit piece.
Assembly, Fastening, and Built to Take Whatever Visitors Throw at It
With all layers printed, cut, sanded, and prepped, assembly was where all the front-loaded engineering paid off.
Layers were glued and secured with 23-gauge micro-pins — fasteners about the diameter of a sewing needle. Thin enough to be virtually invisible in the finished piece, but strong enough to mechanically lock every layer in place. In a public, hands-on environment, glue alone doesn’t cut it. You need both chemistry and physics holding it together, and that’s exactly what we built.
Because this map lives where people touch it daily, we coordinated with a specialized coating partner to apply a protective finish engineered for real durability. The piece invites interaction — and it’s built to handle it for years.
The whole project moved from concept to installed exhibit in roughly two months. Not because we rushed — but because we’d front-loaded the engineering so thoroughly that by the time it was time to build, every question had already been answered.
Now, It's the Centerpiece of a Public Exhibit
The exhibit is open. The map is installed. And visitors are doing exactly what it was designed for — running their hands across the terrain of a real conservation region in western Tanzania, reading about the villages, the rivers, the protected areas, and the 15,000+ people who live sustainably in this landscape.
It’s not signage. It’s not a poster. It’s a three-dimensional, tactile story — printed on real wood, assembled by hand, and built to hold up under daily public interaction for years.
The response from the institution: “We’re so grateful for all the efforts you all put in on the graphics.”
This is what we mean when we say no idea is too audacious. A 17-layer topographic map, direct-printed on plywood, hand-assembled and hand-sanded, engineered for daily public use? We don’t hear that brief and start listing reasons it’s complicated. We hear it and start figuring out where the indexing holes go.
Got a Brief That Other Print Partners Won't Touch?
Custom substrates, complex assemblies, multi-layer builds, exhibit-grade finishing — the more ambitious the brief, the more we lean in. And we’ll bring the production engineering to make it actually work.
