Wide Format 2018: What Kind of Day Has It Been?

A couple of months ago, I was asked if I was planning to attend the SEMA Show in Las Vegas. I was not—nor was I even familiar with it. And for good reason: SEMA is the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association or, specifically, “the premier automotive specialty products trade event in the world.” That’s a little beyond what we cover here (maybe WhatTheyDrive is in the offing for next year), but I later discovered that there is actually a very good reason why someone would ask if I were going to an automotive specialty products show: it’s a prime venue for vehicle graphics installers to strut their stuff, as well as for substrate manufacturers to launch or showcase new wrapping films. What a long, strange trip it’s been to reach a point where print products launch at an automotive event. Print is everywhere! 

As I remarked in yesterday’s news feature about the recent announcement from ISA and Xplor, colocations—sometimes rather counterintuitive ones—are taking place on a much more frequent basis, and as the traditional print “silos” (I think we need a new term...) converge, print providers would do well to gain at least some familiarity with many different kinds of print applications. So it would not surprise me to someday see a colocation of the SEMA Show and the Sign Expo or SGIA Expo, or perhaps InPrint and the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, because direct printing on eggs is a thing. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but we’re all becoming strange bedfellows.

Convergence is but one of the major trends that impacted the wide-format printing market in 2018. Let’s have a look at convergence, and run down a few others.

Sigh Low

Convergence was really one of the big stories in wide-format, and in print in general, in 2018, the continuation of the recent trend toward the merging of the various once-discrete print segments—display, industrial, commercial, signage, and even textiles. (I dug into it in more detail back in May.) It’s inkjet that has brought all this about. When the same equipment can print on virtually any material or surface, suddenly one print provider can potentially provide all of a customer’s print needs. A customer who may need business cards or brochures may also need signage or interior décor, or retail graphics, or packaging, or even specialty items like T-shirts or pens. And vice versa. In the old days (five years ago?), they would have had to go to half a dozen different providers to get all their print needs fulfilled. Conceivably, they can now go to just one. Now, there can be some practical limitations on what you can offer, but there are fewer and fewer technological limits on what kinds of products you can provide.

(By the way, be sure to check out Heidi Tolliver-Walker’s feature today which adds some quantitative context to the discussion of opportunities in wide-format printing.) 

The Printing of Things

Sonny Curtis was wrong: it’s not love that’s all around, it’s print. I have mentioned in this space many times all the different things that can be printed. Posters, banners, interior and exterior signage, flags, trade show graphics, retail/POP/POS displays, window graphics/clings, backlit graphics, wall graphics, wallpaper, interior décor, floor graphics, vehicle wraps/fleet graphics, T-shirts/hoodies/yoga pants, caps, tote bags, apparel, sportswear/spiritwear, upholstery, pens, smartphone/tablet cases, golf balls, hockey pucks, water bottles/YETI cups, coffee mugs/cups, beer/soda cans, glassware/drinkware, awards—you name it. 

I often joke that it’s only a matter of time before someone develops an inkjet printer that can print on human flesh for digital tattooing, but we may be getting close: Fingernails2Go. A fingernail-printing kiosk originally conceived by Butch Baird, Tensator was brought on board to develop the hardware and software, and HP and Triton were tasked with developing the print engine. You insert your finger(s) into the machine and it prints—using inks that are FDA- and EU-compliant for cosmetic use—digitally right on your digits. (You can also batch-print artificial nails if the idea of sticking your hand in a machine creeps you out.) 

It uses a touchscreen and a complementary smartphone app with which you select the design(s) you want to print. When you’re ready to go, the app finds the printer, and voilà: decorated fingernails in seconds. There is also a very strong social media component to Fingernails2Go, with users—and it’s not just young girls, and there are more than a few guys—sharing their nail designs on Instagram. One top application is bachelor parties or wedding showers; the face of the bride- or groom-to-be is printed on party attendees’ fingernails. (Over time, the act of fingernail clipping or filing could get rather gruesome—or cathartic.) Fingernails2Go is more popular overseas than in the U.S. For now.

The point is, in what I call The Printing of Things, anything can be printed, relatively inexpensively, and relatively easily. There are business opportunities galore in a world where anything can be a specialty-printed object. The trick is to understand how to choose a specialty and then how go about selling it. There are opportunities virtually everywhere; one company I wrote about solely produces graphics for traveling carnivals (for all in tents and purposes...). 

Are You Experienced? 

2018 was the year that experiential graphics caught on, at least as a buzzword. Also called “environmental graphics,” experiential graphics can be thought of as the intersection of signage and décor, and includes floor and window graphics, as well as graphics applied to interior walls, wayfinding signage, decorative accents like graphics applied to elevator doors, and, basically, graphics applied to virtually any surface. Experiential graphics have been thus far confined mostly to office spaces (although residential applications are emerging)—as businesses, associations, or other organizations move into a new office, they choose to brand their interior space—and even their exterior space. 

I wrote at length last summer about the opportunities that many businesses have been having in experiential graphics, as well as how the sales and marketing approach can differ from traditional commercial or even wide-format printing. Restaurant graphics are also a hot application area, and print providers serving (as it were) restaurants have found that they don’t just handle the interior and exterior signage, but even small-format print like menus and other items. 

But Soft! 

Over on our Textiles section, WhatTheyThink’s dedicated follower of (digital) fashion Cary Sherburne has been focusing on digital textile printing, fast fashion, and the concept of the fashion microfactory (see below), but textile printing is still a large and growing part of wide-format and display graphics. Soft signage is not a new trend, per se, but it continues to replace rigid materials for logistical reasons (it’s less cumbersome and less expensive to ship, for example) and PVC and other vinyls for environmental reasons. And when textile-based displays are mounted in SEG (silicone-edge graphics) frames and backlit, they can give the illusion of being rigid displays—and look really nice.

Printing on textiles doesn’t have to stop with signage, although that is the application most analogous to more or less traditional wide-format printing. There can be opportunities in décor, furnishings/upholstery, even apparel. 

As Ryan McAbee points out in today’s Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends feature on the digital textile market, “The market is supported by a complex and well-established textile supply chain, and printers [known as “fabric finishers” in industry speak] are only a very small component. For the most part, commercial printers are locked out of the existing supply chain. Commercial printers should therefore focus on more accessible textile segments that are similar to applications they already produce, such as textile-based sign and display graphics and direct-to-garment [DTG].” In many ways, the same caveat applies to many of these new “silos”—industrial printing and even packaging. There are whole ecosystems surrounding these print markets, and just as your average commercial shop is not going to be printing custom dashboards for BMW, they’re also not likely to be doing Gucci’s fall collection. So the opportunities are to be found in using these printing technologies in ways that can be considered “commercial printing.” 

But Software!

If you have been to a trade show recently, you know that most of the action these days is happening in software. As you would imagine, the growing number of surfaces and substrates means nothing but headaches in the area of color management, so color software developers will continue to be the hardest working men and women in show business. At the same time, RIPs (although fewer and fewer people are calling them RIPs anymore) are becoming full-featured production control centers that are automating as much of the production process as possible. For wide-format, the emblematic example of automation is nesting optimization, or using software to automatically fit as many printed items on a single board, which is a great way to avoid wasting what can be expensive substrates. It’s also quicker than manually ganging items in Illustrator. All the data about how to extract the nested items when printed can be stored in the cutfile for the job and a cutting table can automatically cut out all the individual prints. 

Automation has been slow to come to wide format, and the last couple of years have at least broached the subject, even if wide-format and specialty printing are still largely manual processes, certainly compared to traditional commercial printing. (It’s a couple of years old, but I did a deep dive on “RIPs” for wide format over at Wide Format & Signage which has some more background on the topic.)

One topic that has emerged in recent years and dominated FESPA back in May was the concept of the “microfactory.” If you follow Cary’s features—and I strongly recommend you do—you know that a big part of digital textile printing is the microfactory, and while not excusive to apparel production, it is becoming particularly entrenched there. Essentially, a microfactory is a system in which a consumer orders an item—a customized pair of yoga pants, for example—online, perhaps even uploads a design, and the item is manufactured on the spot, with the system shunting the file through all the stages of prepress and production, and the printed fabric sent to sewing and finishing, and finally shipped. It’s a sell-produce-ship model, which is more streamlined than the usual produce-warehouse-sell (or hope-to-sell) model. As The Printing of Things continues, more items will be produced using the microfactory concept—which, when you get right down to it, is really just a highly-automated web-to-print system.

Looking Ahead

Before we break for WhatTheyThink’s holiday hiatus, the final feature for the year will go over some of the things I’ll be keeping an eye on as we head into 2019. And maybe I should make plans to attend the SEMA Show next year.

By the way, I am always on the lookout for unique wide-format and specialty graphics projects, as well as businesses that have successfully added these new product and service areas. If you have any interesting examples or stories you’d like to share with the WhatTheyThink readership, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you! Find article here PrintingNews.com/00000000 ■