Printing services
for Milwaukee, WI.

Printing for the way Milwaukee does business.

Milwaukee is manufacturing, brewing, healthcare and a lakefront festival calendar, and its businesses print with a sturdy, honest hand.

Milwaukee’s economy is manufacturing and engineering, with global industrial companies headquartered here, healthcare and insurance, a brewing tradition that became a craft industry, and a summer of festivals on the lakefront that fills the calendar. The Third Ward and downtown carry the offices, restaurants and galleries; Bay View and Walker’s Point carry the bars, studios and makers; the suburbs carry the households.

Print in Milwaukee should be solid and clear. Cards that survive a shop floor, sales sheets for the engineers, postcards and rack cards for the Third Ward, flyers and banners for the festival season. Design is direct, midwestern and a little proud of its craft.

Where print earns its keep in Milwaukee.

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

The Third Ward and downtown. Offices, restaurants and galleries. Cards that feel established and postcards for openings.

Bay View and Walker’s Point. Bars, breweries, studios and makers. Flyers, postcards and rack cards.

The industrial corridors and the Menomonee Valley. Manufacturing, engineering and the trades. Cards that survive a pocket and sales sheets with real numbers.

The Wisconsin Center and the Summerfest grounds. Conferences and the world’s largest music festival. A retractable banner and rack cards.

One clear purpose. The right piece of paper.

What Milwaukee tends to order. Milwaukee's manufacturers and engineering firms buy sales sheets the way they buy spec documents, dense with real numbers and meant to survive a folder for months, while a business card just needs to be sturdy enough for a shop floor. Insurance and healthcare offices downtown want a clean, professional card for client meetings. Craft brewing and the lakefront festival calendar make up the rest of the city's print, running on rack cards, postcards and trifold brochures sized for a tasting room counter or a festival table.

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 Milwaukee note. Milwaukee likes strong, honest design: a bold sans-serif, one colour, a gloss card for the trades and a matte card for the office. The 32pt ultra thick card reads as engineered, which is a compliment here.

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 Milwaukee. Milwaukee's industrial corridors and downtown sit close together, but the western and northern suburbs are a genuine drive away, so a delivery covering both a factory and a suburban office rarely suits one timeline. Lake Michigan keeps summers milder than inland Wisconsin but adds humidity, and winters bring real cold and lake-effect snow that can slow deliveries into the region generally. The lakefront festival season brings heavy downtown traffic and parking restrictions, worth planning around for anything timed to arrive during that stretch.

Mailing in Milwaukee. For postcards by route, Bay View, Wauwatosa, Shorewood and the East Side 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.