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Quality Automation Graphics just happened to stumble into a trend.

After selling touch screens, graphical user interfaces and three-dimensional graphics and animation services for the building controls industry for the past 18 months, the company now is receiving calls daily for its services from businesses that want its displays to show a “green” message to the public.

“Just like any other company, you just adapt to the trend,” said Dan McCarty, owner of Quality Automation Graphics. “This trend just happens to be enormous. It’s unreal how it just took off.”

Earlier this month, the Ankeny-based company inked a deal with Leawood, Kan.-based Lynxspring Inc. to have exclusive rights to its JENE-PC1000 controller. The component allows Quality Automation Graphics to sell an energy efficiency education display (EEED) that links a screen to a building’s control system to display the building’s energy use and other information in real time – that is in addition to the historical or simulated data the company can input manually.

The “gateway” component Lynxspring provides is unique in that it is designed to be compatible with the touch screen, rather than using a software program that requires several additional steps to upload the data, McCarty said.

It also counts for one credit toward the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating under the innovation and design category. It has become a marketing tool for companies, which allow visitors or tenants to browse through a Web-site-like program to learn more information about the building, such as how it was designed and how it currently saves energy.

“They use all these green products and energy-efficiency equipment,” McCarty said. “Now they want to show how efficient that is to the customer or internal tenant.”

Most of Quality Automation Graphics’ competitors and customers are on the East and West coasts and in Chicago, but the technology is just starting to garner interest in the Midwest, McCarty said. Some of its larger clients are Eaton Corp., Johnson Controls Inc., and other companies that make energy-efficient products and want to showcase those products’ efficiencies in a building. McCarty said architects also are becoming interested in the displays as a way to help clients achieve LEED designations, and schools are also using it for educational purposes.

With Lynxspring’s component and a deal with NextWindow Ltd. (his brother-in-law is a vice president at NextWindow and owns part of the manufacturer that makes touch screens), McCarty said he can sell the EEEDs for much less than his competitors. The average price is $1,500, with the goal to sell in volume.

“Every customer we’ve talked to has asked for or has this,” McCarty said. “Two years ago, no one was really doing this. There were a few early adopters, but now it’s everybody.”

McCarty has lived in Ankeny his entire life, apart from when he attended the University of Iowa. He has worked in the interactive multimedia industry since 1998, with one of his first companies using new technology to put video onto CD-ROM; it created the Best Buy kiosks that allowed customers to navigate through songs and listen to music. Before the green trend, McCarty said his clients were using touch screens and custom-built content to display their buildings’ energy efficiencies, just not in real time.

Quality Automation Graphics has grown from three people, when McCarty acquired the assets of a failing company in 2006, to 11 and he expects to add eight more people in the next year. Most are graphic designers.

Beyond the EEED displays, the company designs graphical user interfaces for building controls, such as developing a 3-D graphic of a fan system that will, for example, light up in one section if the filter is dirty. It also creates graphics for building automation systems; it updated Siemens Building Technologies’ library of 2,200 graphics, which McCarty said took five months.

Despite the company’s recent changes, McCarty doesn’t believe the “green” trend will last more than a couple of years.

“This is short-lived,” he said. “Before long, this is not going to be a big deal. As the technology advances, that’s just how it is. Then you’re on to the next thing.”