When we look back there was nothing much in the industry around a couple of decades ago or so, except manual effort to make signage and displays. But the change that has taken place in the industry with advanced printers and technologies in sign making is a sudden phenomenon. For instance, after several centuries of brush and spray sign works, it was during the 1990s everything took a major turn in the industry with the advent of vinyl cutters and soon after that came the phase of digital large-format printers and easy-to-use graphic art software.

Digital large-format printers and advanced photo-editing software have transformed the age-old tradition of monochrome world into the vibrantly colourful signage world that we know today. In this rapid technological transformation, 3D printing is another new wave in the industry. Large-format 3D printing machines are designed to fabricate object of any size and shape without the restrictions of traditional methods.

Most 3D printers are fairly simple as they essentially comprise an XY carriage, a Z platform and a printhead which can be a heated nozzle that extrudes melted plastic or a laser that can either solidify liquid resin or fuse powdered mental into a finished part. In the process, XY carriage positions the printhead wherefrom drops of plastic or laser burst are emitted.

To know the production process, let’s take an example of producing a 3D logo of a company using a 3D printer that works with plastic filament. What is needed in the first place is the high-quality artwork of the logo that has to be transferred into an X,Y and Z programme that converts the 2D artwork into commands that form a 3D object. After converting the 2D artwork into a 3D printable format, which is normally a .stl file, the file finally moves to the slicer, a software designed to prepare and send a print code to the deposition stage. After this stage the build material will convert into slice commands that the printer tracks and layers, one material layer on top of the other.

Depending on the material which the printer uses, building of 3D object by adding layer-upon-layer of material can be done whether with plastic, metal, concrete or…someday human tissue. Using of CAD is common in the process of sketching in 3D printing. Once the CAD sketch is produced, the workflow software reads in data from the CAD file and adds successive layers of the material in the layer-upon-layer fashion to fabricate the 3D object.

Unlike the normal printer, once the layering process started in a 3D printer, operator can sit back and relax as it will be time consuming and take hours to complete job. However, this processing time depends on the material, resolution and the choice of selected fill. In addition to time, another detrimental aspect of 3D printing is the finishing step that can be more time consuming, but there are printers in the market that can produce 3D-printed objects in full colour—but these printers are comparatively expensive.

The mention of some common applications of 3D printing in signage will include soft signage frames, which are traditionally made out of aluminium, wood, acrylic and steel. These frames can be produced on a 3D printer. Another application is channel letters, which are made out of metal or plastic and often internally illuminated. Using of 3D printer in production of channel letters saves a lot of time and money compared to any other traditional method. Another area where 3D printing has gained a new ground is in the architecture industry.

There are popular 3D printer manufacturers in the market such as Massivit, BigRep and others. Massivit was recently assigned by Sismaitalia, an Italian service bureau, in an architectural restoration project, involving a palace in Ferrara, renovated as a hotel in need of urgent repairs as five of its balcony capitals were crumbling. Sismaitalia was called in by the owners after they realised that restoration of the balcony would require hours of manual labour, making it costly and time consuming. That’s exact replicas of 3D printed super-large objects were created within a fraction of the time and cost compared to traditional methods. The 3D models for palace restoration were designed with the help of photographs of the declining capitals and all the five capitals were printed in two different sizes: 480 x 430 x 215mm, and the larger set measuring 790 x 790 x 215mm.

Italian print provider Colorzenith used Massivit 3D printer to produce a life size replica of the classic Italian car, Lancia B24, for the Don Pasquale opera, performed in Europe’s largest opera house La Scala in Milan. Colorzenith produced the iconic car on its Massivit 1800 3D printer. The 4.23-m long and 1.3m high car was 3D printed in four parts in four days.

Another landmark 3D printed project for visual communication application, METROPOLE created an ultra-realistic, full-size triceratops to promote a new palaeontology exhibition at Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. METROPOLE brought the visually-striking dinosaur to life using Massivit 1800 3D printer in just two days. The reptile model of 1.8m-wide, 2.33m-long and 3m-high grazed on vegetation at the Gare d’Austerlitz railway station, adjacent to the museum. Through there is prospect of 3D printing in the signage industry, but for now, the technology is still at the beginning stage.