Wide-Format 2019: What’s Next?

A couple of weeks ago, we looked back at wide-format in 2018. This week, let’s look ahead to 2019 and some of the wide-format trends we can expect. 

All You Can Eat

First of all, we can expect the industry convergence of commercial, sign and display, industrial, packaging, specialty, textile, et al., to continue and accelerate. “Commercial printing” will increasingly be ink on virtually anything and everything, and shops will need to pick and choose the applications—the products—they want to produce. There will continue to be the danger of what we might call “choice fatigue”: there are so many potential printed products a shop can offer that deciding what to focus on can be like facing a really good buffet table. It all looks so good, but eating everything is obviously impractical (or at least inadvisable), so where do you start? A good place to start whittling down the list of options is current customers. What kind of products do they need? Another good way to focus your offerings is to pursue what you particularly like or would find “cool” to produce. What gets you excited as print provider? Or, conversely, identify what you specifically don’t want to offer. 

All You Can Wear

As we head into 2019 and toward 2020, one hot area will continue to be digital textile printing. This really really heated up this year, and we have seen a plethora of new textile inks, dye- and pigment-based, that can print digitally on a greater variety of natural and synthetic fabrics, especially without a lot of the often complex and environmentally harmful finishing processes like washing or steaming. Fast fashion will continue to be more the rule rather than the exception as brands seek to speed time to market, as well as offer shorter runs and the ability to personalize items. The good news is that it will help “reshore” all the textile production that had been offshored to Asia and elsewhere. Keep following Cary Sherburne’s Textiles page for the latest news in this fast-moving area. 

Textile printing is about more than garment and apparel; soft signage will continue to replace more rigid sign and display graphics. 

All You Can Decorate

Another fast moving area, as I pointed out in the previous feature, is environmental graphics, which is basically the intersection of sign/display and décor. This application area will continue to grow, and will start to migrate to residential décor. I would not be surprised if new home construction increasingly utilizes digital imaging applications. 

Digital décor will also embrace what used to be industrial printing applications. Think about digitally printed “wood” flooring, as an example.  

All You Can Package

Digital packaging is also continuing to build out, especially in combination with retail graphics. Smaller businesses may be a better target market for digital package printing than big-name brands, since packaging has a much larger ecosystem associated with it that can erect fairly substantial barriers to entry. The same is true with industrial printing. The average commercial printer is not going to start printing custom dashboards for BMW, but custom smartphone cases, golf balls, or T shirts for a customer’s sales conference, for example, are not out of the realm of possibility. 

Another technology to keep an eye on is 3D printing. If you saw MakerBot’s announcement last week, they are launching a 3D printer that bridges the gap between desktop and industrial—and there are applications for commercial printers. We’ll be keeping our eyes on that throughout 2019. 

All You Can Know

In many ways, the wide-format printing technologies we have today are largely, if not mature, than certainly heading toward late adolescence. Getting these machines to print on whatever you want to print on is not really the challenge any longer. The challenge now is to construct an efficient workflow to produce these specialty items profitably. Sure, it’s easy to print on a golf ball or any other kind of object. But how do you do it in an efficient and productive way? At the same time, understanding how to market and sell these new print products will also take on new dimensions. 

As shops explore these new applications, the most important aspect of them will be to know—really, intimately know—the substrates you’re printing on. What material stick to what surface, and under what conditions? What adhesives are the best for a given surface and environmental conditions? How will colors look, and how might the environment in which the graphics are installed affect that color over the intended lifespan of the graphic? 

For example, a friend of mine owns a gym here in upstate New York and  a couple of years ago, he had window graphics installed. Window graphics are best installed above 40°F (glass expands and contracts as the temperature changes)—but the local sign shop tried putting them on in February when it was below freezing. When the weather warmed, the graphics started to peel off and had to be reprinted and reinstalled. 

The same applies—as it were—to inks. It’s common to hear people say, “with flatbed UV printers and inks you can print on virtually any surface.” And as a broad statement that’s true, but it’s not true that the exact same UV ink can be used on every kind of surface. Inks need to be formulated to print on different surfaces (glass vs. plastic vs. wood, for example), or at least given an adhesive assist by pre- or post-treatments. It’s kind of like textiles; different inks are needed to print on different fabrics. And while the Holy Grail is “one ink to rule them all,” we’re not there yet, in textiles or elsewhere. 

At any rate, it’s safe bet that “ink chemist” is going to be a highly lucrative field to be in for the foreseeable future.

All You Can Do

With a lot of these new applications, the printer is involved with a job for a longer period of time than has been the case in the past. When you print brochures or postcards or statements, problems are (usually) immediately apparent and any required redos are done not long after the job is delivered. With applied graphics, décor, signage, and these other kinds of applications, if they are printed on the wrong material or installed incorrectly, you may get a nasty phone call months after the job was finished. You may also find yourself needing to offer warranties with certain kinds of graphics, which is standard in the signage world.

The good news is that you’re not on your own; substrate manufacturers or distributors are a great resource to help navigate these materials, because, as these new applications proliferate, having extremely detailed knowledge of substrates and surfaces will be today’s—and tomorrow’s—competitive advantage.