These days it feels like every available surface both indoors and outside can be used to maximize messaging. Should we lament that or celebrate it?
We choose to celebrate.
Signs and banners help all types of brands advertise their products and gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) influence buyers. Wall and floor decals entice and direct customers and provide wayfinding. Point-of-purchase displays encourage impulse buys and add-ons. If you pay attention, you will likely see multiple items every day that were printed via wide format (sometimes called large format) printing.
What is Wide Format Printing?
Wide-format printing employs large inkjet devices to print graphics onto large sheets or rolls of substrates, including paper, vinyl, fabric, and even hard surfaces like wood or metal. This print method emerged at the end of the 20th Century amidst new inkjet technologies of the time. With the advancement of software and design tools and cloud computing, we now have printers that are endlessly versatile. Because of this versatility combined with cost-effectiveness on short and medium print runs, wide-format printing has exploded in popularity.
Let’s take a look at just a handful of the types of wide-format products that can be used to help decorate the world. Large format allows brands to message EVERYWHERE.
Posters – a poster is a type of print, sometimes a reproduction of an original work of art or photo, and sometimes is digitally designed by a graphic designer. Standard posters are usually used to advertise events, ideas, or products. From anywhere from 11×17, to subway-sized, posters can provide wayfinding, advertise, or inform. You see them in doctors’ offices, on kiosks adverting bands playing in local bars, and at fun runs.
Banners – banners, typically printed on vinyl, Tyvek, or other flexible materials and are usually hung up in public places in order to get a message out there. They can also be found at construction sites, at sporting events, and even farmers’ markets.
Trade Shows – whether at something as small as a 6-foot table at a career fair or a 40-foot walk-in site at a major consumer event, wide format printing allows companies and organizations to WOW with print. This can include graphics on floors and other surfaces.
Grand Format – Grand format printing involves any printable material from about seventy inches wide up to more than one hundred inches wide. Think billboards, massive banners; even covering an entire building with graphics.
Direct to Substrate – Direct-to-substrate printing (DTSP) utilizes inkjet technology to print high-quality, full-color images directly onto a variety of substrates, including metals such as stainless steel and aluminum, as well as other materials like wood, plastics, glass, ceramics, PVC, and acrylics.
Wide format has come a LONG way in the last 30 years. There is quite literally nothing and nowhere that your message cannot be placed.
Let Brooks Litho help you navigate this exciting landscape of powerful possibilities. Wide Format can WOW your customers and their customers. We can help.