Glass is fairly ubiquitous in our lives, and historically people have been looking for ways to bring functional and artistic decoration to this interesting medium—think stained glass, for example. Some of my earliest memories of decorating glass were of the guy hand lettering someone’s name on the glass of an office door. It was simple but useful. Today, decorating glass can be used to control levels of transparency and opacity or graphic decoration and signage.

Over the years, many different methods have been used to decorate glass including painting, silk screen, sandblasting, etching, decal and cling films, and of late the increasing use of inkjet technology. Using ceramic frit-based inks in a flatbed inkjet printer, you can print directly on to the glass. To create permanence, you fire or temper the printed glass to fuse the ceramic inks to the glass in a fairly quick and repeatable way.

To achieve color matching as well as variable levels of translucency and transparency, specially designed inks and image processing software have been developed.