We can identify five primary segments in today’s printing industry:

As we all know, the lines between these segments are blurring; heck, entire trade events have been based on this very premise. We all have a pretty clear idea what four out of five of these areas consist of, but the last one—industrial—has tended to be the murkiest.

We can define industrial printing as “printing that is done as part of a manufacturing process.” Unlike commercial printing, where the print itself is the end product, in industrial applications, the printing adds decoration, information, and/or branding to a functional object that is itself the end product. Think of brand names on auto parts, the text and symbols on a dashboard, the gradations on a medical syringe, the numbers and other button indicators on a TV remote—you name it.