Printing for the way Knoxville does business.
Knoxville is a university, a national laboratory next door, a downtown that came back to life and the gateway to the Smokies, and its businesses print with warmth.
Knoxville is the University of Tennessee and the businesses that serve it, a national laboratory and the engineering and energy firms around it, healthcare, and a downtown and Old City rebuilt with restaurants, breweries and studios. Market Square and Gay Street carry the offices and the restaurants; the Old City carries the venues; Bearden and Sequoyah Hills carry the boutiques, practices and households; the counties around carry the growth.
Print in Knoxville is friendly and local. Rack cards and postcards on Market Square, flyers and door hangers around campus and the neighbourhoods, clean cards and sales sheets for the lab and the healthcare vendors, banners for the football season and the festivals. Design is warm, a little orange when it wants to be, and honest.
Where print earns its keep in Knoxville.
Print works differently in different parts of a city. These are the places in Knoxville where a printed piece tends to do the most work, and the piece that usually suits each one.
Market Square and Gay Street. Restaurants, shops and offices. Postcards, rack cards and cards for the meetings.
The Old City. Venues, bars and studios. Flyers and postcards that look like posters.
Bearden and Sequoyah Hills. Boutiques, practices and neighbourhood businesses. Rack cards, postcards and door hangers.
The university and the convention center. Campus, football weekends and conferences. Flyers, banners and a sales sheet.
One clear purpose. The right piece of paper.
What Knoxville tends to order. Knoxville's national lab and the engineering firms around it want clean, specification-heavy sales sheets and understated cards, a contrast with the university's steady need for postcards and rack cards around admissions, sports and campus events. Football weekends bring a burst of demand for flyers, rack cards and banners at bars near campus and downtown. The boutiques and practices in the residential districts run on the same postcards and rack cards as any small city, just with a warmer, more local feel.
Put a readable name first, then one line about what you do, then the one contact route you want people to use. A finish should support that, never make it harder to read.
Compare business card finishes| The moment | What usually works |
|---|---|
| A football weekend downtown | Flyers, rack cards and a banner for a bar or a vendor |
| A conference at the convention center | A retractable banner, booth cards and a sales sheet |
| A restaurant opening in the Old City | Postcards and rack cards from opening night |
| A practice in Bearden or Farragut | Rack cards and a neighbourhood postcard drop |
Make the whole set feel like your business.
A Knoxville note. Knoxville design is warm and unpretentious: a friendly typeface, one strong colour, a matte or gloss card depending on the trade. Put the neighbourhood on the piece; here it means something. For the lab and engineering crowd, clean and precise.
A brand does not need every piece to look identical, only a consistent voice, a deliberate palette and type that works at several sizes. Bring your logo, or start from nothing: print product design is $97 and logo design is $250, set up for the product and finish you picked.
See what design costsPlan around the day you need it in hand.
Work backward from the day the materials have to be ready, and leave room for artwork, the proof, production and shipping. Each product page states its own time on press: two to three business days for most cards and postcards once you approve your proof, three to four for soft touch and door hangers, seven to twelve for the XL banner. Shipping sits on top of that. Give us the delivery address and your date when you order, with a receiving name if it is going to a venue, a hotel or a shared office. If the date is fixed, say so and we will tell you whether it is possible before you pay.
Getting print into Knoxville. Knoxville's downtown and campus sit close together, but the surrounding counties spread out fast into hills and lake country, so a delivery to a practice in one of the outer communities can be a longer drive than the map distance implies. Football weekends fill downtown hotels and clog the roads around campus. Humidity runs high in summer, hard on stock left sitting in a hot vehicle, and the university's mail services handle a heavy volume during the academic year that can slow routing to a department.
Mailing in Knoxville. For postcards by route, Sequoyah Hills, Bearden, Fountain City and Farragut are neighbourhoods where a mailer reaches households and gets read.
Give the file your full attention.
Use the artwork guide on the product you picked, because the finished size, the bleed and the safe area are not the same for every format. Upload a PDF, PNG or JPG and the size, bleed and resolution are checked in your browser, then your proof arrives by email and nothing goes to press until you approve it. Read your own details out loud when it lands: names, numbers, web addresses, dates, spelling and which side is which. If there is a QR code, scan it yourself.
See the artwork guide on a product