As the end of the year draws near, it’s time to look back and take stock of 2023 in the world of wide-format printing, display graphics, and signage.

It was toward the end of the Great Recession at the start of the 2010s that we started to see substantial movement in adoption of display graphics printing technologies. Photolabs, service bureaus, and others whose primary businesses were disappearing started adding display graphics and the wide-format printing, and it wasn’t long before commercial printers began following suit. Around mid-decade, I was at a National Print and Sign Owners Association (NPSOA) conference, and talking with attendees it was clear that the fastest growing part of the business was display graphics. By the end of the end of the decade, the migration to wide-format slowed. This was not to say that there were no more opportunities to be had in display graphics—it was still a hot product application area—just that companies that were likely to have added these capabilities had already added them. By 2019, our Print Business Outlook survey reinforced that, and also identified that somewhere around 30% of the industry would remain “never wides”—or never likely to add wide-format printing capabilities. But never say never…

So that was where we stood on the Eve of Destruction. And then: 2020, where wide-format printing was a—if not the—saving grace during the pandemic, with the infamous “pivot” to safety signage, distancing dots, and all the display graphics ephemera of the lockdown era. But, at the same time, there was the shutdown of key vertical markets for display graphics producers, such as events, travel, etc.