CMU School of Drama


Friday, November 14, 2008

Exhibit Design Toolbox: More Tape!

ExhibiTricks: "Perhaps this posting should be called, 'Son of The Sticky Subject of Tape' in honor of our prior posting concerning specialty tapes that exhibit designers should know about.
Claire Pillsbury from The Exploratorium was kind enough to offer some additional suggestions concerning cool, useful, and unusual types of tape"

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some of these tapes sound really cool, although I'm a little unsure why one would need to buy tape to specifically mark boxes empty or packed- wouldn't a sharpie be cheaper? The idea of tape that's stronger after 24 hours is pretty awesome though, maybe some day I'll find an excuse to use it.

E. Theodore Sosna said...

Tape is pretty fantastic stuff, and some of these are pretty cool. The super sticky ones are always my favorite though the optically clear tapes are great for those oh so awesome gel piecing instances. I wonder if someone has anything like this but sorta like a bipolar version of the terribly tacky stuff, something that is positionable until a catalyst is added and then it gets super duper strong. I don't know how the scientists would create that, but it would certainly be cool.

Anonymous said...

Glue dots SUCK. They're useless. I had several boxes of them given to me at some point a few years ago, and never found a use for them. They're too discrete for applications with large surface area, and not as good as doublestick tape for small applications. They're also thick enough to see their profile underneath the thing you're sticking, so your best bet is just to go for the rubber cement or spray adhesive.

I guess they're good for scrapbooking and they are far more useful than gluesticks..

Serrano said...

That 3M fastener stuff is cool. It is essentially velcro but it doesn't collect fuzz. May not seem like a big difference but it's nice if you are laying out and taking up carpet a lot.

The packed and unpacked tape is interesting too, but that could also be down with color coding.

Anonymous said...

I am really surprised that gaff tape was not on the list. I am honestly constantly amazed by the weirder types of tape out there, especially when the tape sounds more like a roll of gluey film. A lot of these tapes just sounded like variations on stuff that already exist, or in the case of the labeled tape, existed to make a job only slightly easier. I almost worry that some of these tapes were invented for very specific applications and are being used for things they technically are not supposed to be needed for.