Designers, event planners, and marketers looking to visually brand, market or promote a product or organization at trade shows, special events or building entrances can now transform floor space with custom, digitally printed, dye-sublimated carpets.

While posters, banners and other display media have long been used to reach out to prospects in interior spaces, traditional wall space is often over-cluttered. Wall space is full of structural elements including doors, windows, light switches and fire extinguishers, as well as signs, paintings and other visual distractions.

In contrast, interior floor space is uncluttered, marking a huge empty space that can be transformed into your personal advertising medium with custom digitally printed carpets. Customers interact with your visual brand—your logo, your message, your mascot—because this novel format draws the eye in; they walk over it and they touch it. The surface becomes an event in itself.

From Aladdin’s magic carpet in Disneyland, to a yellow brick road themed carpet in a New York City Furla Fashion Week event; from a promotional New York Jets football field carpet lined and numbered like the real gridiron, to carpet displaying earthquake fault lines at a California museum and inlay carpeting of the UConn Huskies’ mascot showing school pride in the basketball locker room, designers are actively exploring the new display and branding possibilities that digitally printed carpet provide.

Digital dye-sublimation printed carpets can be printed in the full-color spectrum from any electronic image, in sizes and shapes limited only by the designer’s imagination. If a designer can create an image on the computer screen, it can be created and color-matched perfectly in a variety of carpet grades.

For instance, my company Enhance a Colour can create a promotional grade carpet for trade shows and short-term events up to 10 by 50 feet in length, which can be laser cut into smaller size “tiles” that can be put together to create any size visual display required. Circles and irregular shapes, such as a winding yellow brick road, are also possible. Such promo-grade carpet with a rubberized back is good for 60 days of use.

Trade show and event carpet, good for up to one year of use with or without a pad, is available in the same sizes and can be similarly “tiled” to create virtually any size visual display. Heavier “Ultra” carpet, designed for corporate settings, museums, schools, retail spaces and anywhere requiring longer term use, can be created in 10 by 12 foot sections and “tiled” for larger displays. Available as 16 oz. and 30 oz. carpet, this thicker carpet with jute backing is good for more than five years.

While promotional carpet was available to designers previously, it was limited in size, function and color-matching capability. In the past, some vendors printed in solvent ink, which could not be walked on, and was not colorfast or washable. UV inks were a little better, but still not washable.

In digitally printed dye-sublimated carpets, the carpet colors are actually transferred into the fibers of the carpet using extreme heat and pressure during printing. This means the carpet colors are colorfast. The carpet can be shampooed, machine-washed, or steam cleaned and still look picture perfect—even in high-use areas.

Traditional carpet inlay that was sewn together in several pieces seldom matched colors well. In contrast, carpet inlay using dye-sublimated printing can exactly color-match even a one-of-a-kind logo, mascot or insignia.

Now that designers and marketers have a versatile new creative branding tool in custom, digitally printed carpets, the only question that remains is how far their imaginations will take them…and their clients.