PSNS & IMF Sign Shop employees produce a variety of products for customers in Bremerton, San Diego and Japan

PSNS & IMF Sign Shop employees produce a variety of products for customers in Bremerton, San Diego and Japan

By Max Maxfield, PSNS & IMF Public Affairs

BREMERTON, Wash. -

The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility Sign Shop produces a wide variety of printed products to help inform and educate the workforce.

The Sign Shop, which is part of Shop 71, Painters, Blasters and Tile setters, can design and print everything from a sticker to the panels on the billboards above Building 431 and Building 460.

According to Ray Brunson, a Sign Shop fabricator who has been with the Sign Shop for more than seven years, the team makes safety signs, stickers, stencils, posters, magnets, banners, and even prints out billboard panels. The team produces products to support events such as hiring fairs, outreach events, PSNS & IMF Family Day, award ceremonies and change-of-command ceremonies.

While some personnel are assigned to the shop on a long-term basis, other members of Shop 71 can be assigned on an as-needed basis. According to Aaron Sewell, sign shop supervisor, sign shop personnel bring both technical skills and creativity to the office to support customers at PSNS & IMF in Bremerton, as well as supporting PSNS & IMF Detachment San Diego, and personnel deployed to Japan.

"We have two to three long term fabricators who work alongside various employees who come in and help out with cutting, laying things out, mounting, etc.," Sewell said. "The fabricators are required to have a working knowledge of design programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. We also use a similar program called Omega, which is another graphic design program."

According to six-year sign shop fabricator James Kelley, when the shop moved from the second floor of Building 457 down to the first floor last year, they added capabilities.

"We added a new very large format flatbed printer, which allows us to print directly on some of our larger 4'x 8' materials such as corrugated plastic and foam," he said. "Moving downstairs also allowed us to expand our workspace and add more worktables to help accommodate a large workload at times."

According to Danielle Blas, who has worked in the sign shop for about a year, the most requested items include safety signs, hazardous waste stickers, hard hat stickers, calendars as well as name placards for cubicles. She said customers can access the Shop Work Request Site through the Shop 71 homepage on SharePoint, at homeportnw.psns.navy.mil/dept/300/360/1060Work_Requests/default.aspx.

Customers can bring completed designs to the sign shop to have them printed or integrated into various products. For customers who have ideas of what they want, but do not know how to draw or use graphics software, the experts at the sign shop will assist them.

"Customers sometimes bring us completed ideas that we simply have to print," Kelley said. "Sometimes we modify what's given to us, and other times we design things from scratch. Ideally, people should put in a request through the SharePoint with plenty of time for us to complete the job, but that is not always the case. When we do get urgent requests, we do our best to complete them based on priority."

To ensure the sign shop can produce products quickly, Brunson recommends customers provide useable files.

"We prefer PDFs at least 300 dots per inch in resolution," he said. "Or, if possible, vector files, which are resolution independent. These types of images can be blown up or minimized without affecting the quality of the image."

Brunson said his job allows him to be creative on some projects, which he finds challenging and rewarding.

"I generally like when someone allows me to create something from scratch and be creative," he said. "It allows me to experiment with some of the features in Illustrator that I rarely get to use or am not familiar with."