What counts as large format printing?
Large format printing covers anything too big for standard commercial printing: graphics measured in metres rather than centimetres. Shop fronts, exhibition graphics, site hoardings, oversized banners, wall coverings and display panels all fall into this bracket. If your artwork needs to be seen from across a street, a hall or a car park, it is a large format job.
At Branding Warehouse these prints run on two kinds of UV printer, roll-to-roll and flatbed, and between them they cover most things a business needs printed at scale.
Roll-to-roll or flatbed: which one is your job?
The two machines do different work, and knowing which one your job needs makes your quote quicker.
Roll-to-roll printing feeds flexible material from a roll through the printer. It is the right process for anything that bends: banner material, fabric and other flexible media, in long continuous runs. Think oversized banners, wraps and hanging graphics.
Flatbed printing lays ink directly onto material that stays flat and rigid on the print bed. That is the process for boards, panels and signage that needs to hold its own shape rather than hang or stretch.
Custom sizes, custom pricing
Unlike our standard products, large format work has no fixed price list, because no two jobs are the same size. Pricing follows your dimensions and material, so the fastest route to a number is to send us a quote request with three things: the width and height you need, where the print will live (indoors or outdoors), and roughly how long it needs to last. We come back to you with a price and, where it saves you money, an alternative way to produce the same job.
If the job is part of a bigger event setup, tell us what else you are planning. Large format prints often pair with our standard banners, flags and display products, and quoting it as one package is usually cheaper than piecing it together.
Getting artwork right at this scale
Small artwork problems become very visible at two or three metres wide. Three rules keep a large format job sharp:
- Build logos and text from vector artwork wherever possible, so edges stay crisp at any size.
- Supply photographic imagery at high resolution for the finished print size, not the size it looks on screen.
- Leave bleed and a safe margin at the edges so nothing important is lost when the print is trimmed or finished.
When a standard product is the better buy
Not every big graphic needs a custom job. If what you actually need is a promotional wall, a backdrop banner comes as a complete kit with a frame. If it is pavement or forecourt signage, an A-frame is built for exactly that. And if the graphic needs to stand up at an event, our pull up banners and fabric frames are large format printing with the hardware already solved. Custom large format is for everything those standard formats do not cover.
