Our Background
The Engineers Behind Every Wall We Print
DODS DesignWorks isn't a print shop that added a wall printer. It's an engineering background that found its way onto walls, floors, and glass.
We call this approach Inkitecture™ — and everything below is the engineering that makes it possible.
An Electrical Engineering Foundation
Both founders of DODS DesignWorks are electrical engineers by training. Before this business existed, our careers were built in industrial marking and coding — the equipment manufacturers use to print lot numbers, expiration dates, barcodes, and identifying marks directly onto products and packaging, in real time, on live production lines. That work centered on three categories of equipment: inkjet systems, labeling systems, and laser systems.
Part of that career included time with a company based in Milan, Italy, along with years of international collaboration across manufacturing and print technology — work that meant learning how different industries, standards, and production environments around the world approach the same core problem: getting ink to bond permanently and precisely to a surface, without room for error.
Eventually, that background pointed somewhere unexpected: architectural surfaces. If an inkjet or laser system can mark a bottle moving down a line at speed with zero tolerance for drift, the same discipline — applied at a much larger scale — can put a mural directly onto a wall, floor, or pane of glass with a level of precision vinyl and hand-applied graphics were never built for.
The MK-02 System, by Friankor
DODS DesignWorks operates the MK-02, a direct-to-surface UV printing system built for large-format architectural printing — walls, floors, glass, and more. The MK-02 is manufactured by Friankor. Visit Friankor's site →
We are a trained, direct-relationship operator of the MK-02 — not a reseller, and not a general print shop that happens to own one alongside several other machines. That distinction matters in practice: understanding the equipment at an engineering level, not just an operational one, is what makes it possible to troubleshoot unusual surfaces, unfamiliar substrates, and edge cases that a purely operational understanding wouldn't prepare someone for.
That relationship runs in both directions. Friankor refers international inquiries about the MK-02 system directly to DODS DesignWorks. It's a meaningful part of why a hyper-local, St. Louis-based business regularly hears from people well outside the St. Louis metro area — people who found this page searching for the MK-02 itself, not a wall mural company.
The Print Heads Inside the MK-02: Epson i1600 & i3200
The MK-02 is built around Epson PrecisionCore print heads — specifically the Epson i1600 and Epson i3200. Epson has one of the most respected names in the inkjet industry, and PrecisionCore is the same MicroTFP (thin-film piezo) print head platform Epson uses in its own industrial printers, not a downgraded or licensed imitation.
Both heads use Epson's Variable Sized Droplet Technology (VSDT) — rather than firing a single fixed dot size, the print head varies ink droplet volume on the fly, from roughly 3.5 picoliters up to larger droplets as a given area of the image calls for it. In practical terms, that's what produces a smooth photographic gradient on a wall instead of a visible, mechanical dot pattern.
The i3200 and i1600 share the same core precision — MEMS-manufactured nozzles and an engineered ink flow path that place every droplet accurately and consistently, run after run. The i3200 does it across 3,200 nozzles for higher-volume production; the i1600 uses a more streamlined 1,600-nozzle configuration. Same accuracy, different throughput, chosen per job.
Quick Specs
- TechnologyPrecisionCore MicroTFP
- Native resolution600 DPI / color
- Droplet controlVariable, from ~3.5 pl
- i3200 nozzles3,200 (8 rows)
- i1600 nozzles1,600 (4 rows)
- Nozzle placementMEMS-precision
From Production Lines to Architectural Walls
Industrial marking and coding equipment has one job: run correctly, every time, on a line that doesn't stop for mistakes. A wrong setting doesn't mean a bad-looking print — it means scrapped product, a halted line, and a real cost. That's the standard we came from, and it's the standard we hold a wall print to.
In practice, that means surface preparation, ink behavior, resolution requirements, and equipment calibration get treated as engineering problems first and creative problems second. The artwork still has to look right — but it also has to bond right, hold up under real-world conditions, and perform the way it was specified to.
It's also why this background tends to resonate with a specific kind of visitor: facility managers, IT and procurement teams, and commercial buyers who want more than "it looks great." They want to know how the equipment works, what the surface requirements are, and why the result holds up — and that's a conversation we're equipped to have in detail.
Have a technical question about the MK-02, surface compatibility, or how a project would actually work?