“Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs,” sang the Five Man Electrical Band in their 1971 hit single “Signs” (perhaps made more famous by the band Tesla’s 1990 cover)—and indeed it’s hard to venture very far without encountering a sign of some kind. As we have written about many times, print businesses have been adding wide-format and display graphics as well as signage to their product and service offerings. When it comes to signage, a lot of traditional print businesses have focused on print-related signage—and understandably so. Not only is ink on a substrate something easily understandable to any print business (heck, it is the print business), but today’s wide-format equipment can print virtually anything, including many kinds of signage.

Signage has a long history—it dates from the earliest human civilizations—and for most of that history, print was a very small portion of it. As a result, to truly get into signage may require being at the very least conversant in a wide variety of manufacturing and construction techniques, materials, and even new technologies, in addition to some kind of ink on some kind of substrate. If a small business is looking for a “sign,” what they may—indeed, what they probably—have in mind is not anything printed, but something constructed.

In this feature, we’ll look at some common forms of non-print-related signage.