Team Members from the St. Charles Satellite Center’s Digital Media course recently traveled to Lamar Graphics in Baton Rouge to tour their design and production studio. Lamar Graphics is one of the nation’s leading outdoor and transit advertising firms, offering solutions for clients in the form of bulletins, posters, digital billboards, buses, benches, transit shelters and highway logo signs. The Baton Rouge-based company has more than 200 locations across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.
The team members’ tour guide, Art Director Barb Braud, showed them around the various departments and explained the different roles each department plays within the company.
On the tour they saw designers creating artwork for billboards and transit advertising, billboards being printed on large format printers, printed work being inspected for quality and correctness and the final billboards being packaged for shipping. Next, they visited the interstate sign department where they learned about the screen-printing process and observed interstate informational signs being printed.
Team members also saw Lamar’s newest department – the 3D fabrication shop. In this department workers create custom billboard attachments and/or freestanding 3D sculptures using large blocks of styrofoam. The sculptures are created in a 3D computer modeling program and are then rendered out on a special foam-cutting router. After the foam pieces are cut they are coated with a hard resin to protect them from the environment. When the coating dries the pieces are given a custom paint job by one of the artists in the shop to match the 3D digital sculpture they were modeled after. Before leaving the shop, the pieces are assembled to check for accuracy and are then boxed and shipped.
Ms. Braud concluded the tour by sitting down with the Team Members and discussing the level of education and skills needed to work at Lamar. She also shared the expectations that Lamar has for their employees and talked about the types of characteristics they look for when interviewing potential employees.