Small Shop Takes a Wide View

As the sole in-plant employee for the City of West Allis, Wisconsin, Denise Cleary is used to producing a lot of printing by herself. Tucked away in the basement of City Hall in this 60,000-person town just west of Milwaukee, Cleary stays busy printing everything from tax documents, brochures, postcards, and door hangers on a pair of Xerox Versants, to long runs of envelopes on a two-color ABDick 9870. But one type of work has long been eluding her: wide-format printing.

“I was outsourcing a lot of banners and yard signs,” says Cleary, print and production specialist. This was on her mind when she attended PRINTING United Expo in 2024 and saw the countless wide-format printers on display. She came away with one clear thought: “Why can’t we do this stuff ourselves?”

So, Cleary decided to answer that question. In November her in-plant installed an HP Latex 730, a Graphtec FC 9000-160 contour cutter, and an Ally Armour G164-HA laminator in its 1,700-sq-ft. Creative Services operation.

Denise Cleary stands with her in-plant's new HP Latex 730 wide-format printer.

Armed with these new capabilities, Cleary immediately set to work printing banners, maps, and even magnets to stick to the city’s snow plows. The real opportunity, though, will be printing city road signs and barricade signs, she says. One reason Cleary picked the HP Latex 730, was that it supports printing for standard traffic sign colors. She also loves the high-quality output it produces.

Cleary will print signs on an adhesive substrate then affix them to metal, foam core, corrugated, or coroplast materials, before laminating. One trick she learned from Grimco, the company that sold her the equipment, was to use the laminator like a rollover table to apply self-adhesive vinyl to rigid materials.

“I can run that [vinyl] through the laminator, and it can apply the material onto the yard sign without having to go and do it by hand with a little squeegee,” she says. “It actually acts like a roller.”

Beyond signage, Cleary also plans to print banners, window clings, maps, posters, and stickers, which will be contour cut on the Graphtec FC 9000-160. These new capabilities are sure to be a hit in the city once she starts promoting them, she says.

“Once they find out that they can cut shapes … I can see it growing real big,” she says.

Wide-format printing is just one more way Cleary has made her in-plant indispensable to the City of West Allis.

“There’s a lot of departments that really appreciate the amount of work that I do for them and in the timeline that I do it – because I’m usually pretty fast,” she says.