Printing services
for Austin, TX.

Printing for the way Austin does business.

Austin hands out business cards at a food truck, a tech meetup and a live show in the same evening, and expects all three to look like they came from somewhere with taste.

Austin’s business scene is tech, music, the university and a creative class that turned all three into brands. Startups on the east side and in the Domain, agencies and studios along South Congress and East Sixth, and a hospitality trade that runs on festivals. The bar for design is high here, and the tolerance for anything that looks like a template is low.

The print that works in Austin is opinionated. Matte and soft touch cards with one idea on them. A postcard with an illustration rather than a stock photo. Flyers that look like posters, because in Austin they end up on a wall at a coffee shop and have to earn the space.

Where print earns its keep in Austin.

Print works differently in different parts of a city. These are the places in Austin where a printed piece tends to do the most work, and the piece that usually suits each one.

South Congress and South Lamar. Boutiques, restaurants and studios. Postcards by the register and rack cards for the tourists who take one home.

East Austin. Breweries, venues and creative offices. Flyers for shows, cards for the people who book them.

The Domain and the Arboretum. Corporate tech and the restaurants that serve it. Cards for a team, a sales sheet for the demo.

The Austin Convention Center and Zilker Park. SXSW, ACL and a year of conferences. A retractable banner, cards for the booth, and a flyer that doubles as a schedule.

One clear purpose. The right piece of paper.

What Austin tends to order. Austin is also a state capital, and the lobbying and legislative crowd around the Capitol still trades in a business card and a one-page sales sheet, a more buttoned-up need than the tech and music scenes suggest. The hardware and semiconductor manufacturers on the city's edges lean on trifold brochures and sales sheets thick with specifications for supplier fairs and recruiting events. Austin's food truck parks and trailer courts add another buyer entirely: a rack card or postcard at a communal seating area reaches a crowd that never opens a laptop.

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.

Make the whole set feel like your business.

A Austin note. Austin rewards restraint with one surprise: a matte card in a single unexpected colour, or a painted edge, does more here than foil ever will. Keep the type small and confident. Everyone in this town has seen a lot of good design; the fastest way to look new is to look like you are not trying to.

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.

Plan 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 Austin. Austin's growth has outpaced its roads, and I-35 traffic can make a delivery to the Domain and one to South Congress a very different length of afternoon at peak periods, so build in slack around rush windows. West Campus student housing near UT routes mail through a central building office rather than individual doors, so a name and unit number matter more than the street address. Hill Country summer heat is dry, kinder to paper than the coast, but a shipment left too long in a hot vehicle can still warp thinner sheets.

Mailing in Austin. For neighbourhood postcards, Hyde Park, Travis Heights, Mueller and Crestview are walkable and dense, and a well-designed mailer there gets pinned to a fridge.

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.