ISA Sign Expo 2019: Into the Woods

In April, the WhatTheyThink/Printing News team converged on the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas for the 75th Annual International Sign Association Sign Expo, and the term is was apt: we converged on an event that was reflective of what some refer to as an industry converging. 

By the end of the first day of the show, 20,000 attendees had walked the show floor to check out the ever-increasing diversity of equipment and materials that can produce signage and display graphics of all kinds. From traditional channel letters and cut lettering, to wide-format printing in all its myriad forms, to LEDs, to holograms—there seemed to be no end to the ways one can produce signage, and that has generated an ever-heightening sense enthusiasm among many attendees. 

“You can feel in the air a palpable sense of excitement,” said Lori Anderson, president and CEO of ISA. 

Over the ISA’s three-quarters-of-a-century history, the technology used to create signage has always been in flux. Funny: it wasn’t too long ago—less than a decade, really—that print was the hot new technology for creating signage. 

The first Sign Expo that I covered was in 2013, and the show hit my own radar because wide-format printing—my primary beat for WhatTheyThink at the time—had started to penetrate into the signmaking market in earnest, and thus had become a relevant show for what I was covering. It has only become more relevant in the years since. At the same time, the Sign Expo has also become even more reflective of the industry—indeed, all the industries that now comprise print—in that signage is just one tree in what has become a vast print forest.

If you have been paying attention to our coverage of the last few Sign Expos, you have seen another tree grow in that forest: textiles, be it soft signage, décor or apparel. In that print forest, printing is printing, and whether it’s signage, specialty items, garments or even commercial printing like direct mail and transactional, opportunities abound in that increasingly thick and lush print forest. As a result, a major announcement at this year’s Sign Expo made perfect sense: next year, the 2020 Sign Expo in Orlando will colocate with the Impressions Expo, formerly the Imprinted Sportswear Show, which focuses on printed apparel. 

“The lines continue to blur,” said Joshua Carruth, show director of Impressions Expo. “There is tremendous value in bringing the two communities together. We couldn’t find a reason why it didn’t work.” 

ISA is no stranger to industry convergence driving colocation; this year’s Sign Expo colocated with Xplor19 to give signage printers an entry into the commercial and transactional printing and commercial printers a peek at sign and display graphics. 

Before the Sign Expo, I had a conversation with Cary Sherburne, who was skeptical that wide-format shops are looking at commercial printing, but just after the Sign Expo I was at another event and was talking to a wide-format shop owner who had done just that. Convergence goes both ways.

These colocations are about exposing print service providers from different parts of the industry to potential sources of new business opportunities. No one is eager to miss the forest for the trees. Find article here PrintingNews.com/00000000 ■