As part of a new exhibit called, Fierce Flora: Tales of Survival and Demise, United States Botanic Garden commissioned 20 tactile graphic illustrations. Each one shows a single plant seen from the side. The printed metal plates are to be displayed in the Botanic Garden, within easy reach of the living plants they depict. 

Inspired by the glass flowers collection at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, Touch Graphics and graphic design .

staff at USBG added raised lines, textures, 3D contours and braille labels to photographs of each plant. These tactile features were built up in solidified white ink in multiple passes on a flatbed UV printer. In the final step, the original color photographs were printed on top of the tactile forms, so that exhibit visitors can experience the illustrations through vision, touch, or a combination of both senses.

The resulting panels are durable, easy to clean with soap and water, and are surprisingly inexpensive to produce, thanks to the advent of UV printing, originally developed for a different purpose, but ideally suited to producing perfectly registered, high resolution tactile and visual graphics on many rigid substrates.