Focus on Software
As vital as getting the right hardware to suit your needs, it is just as important to select the right software. Here are some of the options the market has to offer.
Bringing the next generation Fiery
Fiery XF 9 is Fiery’s next-generation software RIP, colour management, and workflow solution for large-format print production. Winner of the 2025 Pinnacle Award for best large-format RIP software, Fiery XF 9 delivers cutting-edge capabilities that unlock new levels of value out of large-format print operations, helping print providers produce creative, consistent, and professional results. Fiery XF 9 integrates with Fiery FreeForm Create 2.0, Fiery’s pinnacle award-winning variable data printing (VDP) software, for streamlined, user-friendly personalised printing. Large-format print providers can use a single, unified VDP creation process across all Fiery driven large-format printers, with no extra tools to learn and no device-specific workflows to manage. The result is easier creation of targeted and versioned materials with custom images, text, and barcodes that can drive stronger customer engagement, with more flexibility and fewer bottlenecks to production. Fiery XF 9 also integrates with Fiery ColorGuard, Fiery’s cloud-based colour control solution that enables the production
of consistent colour all day, every day. ColorGuard provides all the
necessary tools to verify colour quality, quickly correct deviations, and evaluate colour performance over time, as well as prove colour compliance – ensuring you deliver the colour quality that large-format customers demand. ColorGuard is available as a free add-on. In addition, Fiery XF 9 offers AI-powered print bleed that automatically generates realistic bleed to create professional, gallery-style canvas-wrap edges, or to avoid print quality issues caused by missing bleed content not created at the prepress stage – making creating polished final products simple and fast.
www.fiery.com Unified print room software
Clarity Software
Why sign and print businesses choose specialist software
It is important to pick the right software
Running a sign business is demanding enough without software that gets in the way. You are quoting jobs, managing artwork, scheduling installs, handling customer changes and trying to keep production moving. The last thing you need is a system that adds admin rather than removing it. That frustration is what the company hears from businesses reassessing how they work. They want control over quoting, job tracking, artwork, and production, without relearning their entire operation. Usually, that is the point at which they start looking at a specialist MIS built for sign companies, rather than one borrowed from retail or manufacturing. Businesses come to Clarity from all sorts of systems, and
each tends to let them down in its own way. All-in-one platforms stretched across five industries feel bloated and slow to learn.
Enterprise systems built for national franchises turn routine jobs into multi-step chores. Legacy tools have stopped evolving, so years of job history sit stranded with no clean upgrade path. And the spreadsheets and inboxes that carry a business through its early years start to crack as it grows. Quotes end up in one place, artwork in another and nothing talks to anything else. Clarity Software takes the opposite view. It stays anchored to how UK sign businesses actually work, in the cloud from day one, with quoting, artwork, job progress and install details all in one place. The company has also built the commercial side around trust. No
setup fees, no long contracts and a proper free trial, so you test the system on real jobs before spending anything. Every customer gets hands-on onboarding and a dedicated customer success manager, many of whom have worked in the trade themselves. What Clarity customers are often looking for is the confidence to take a week off without the business falling apart. That is what it sets out to give them.
www.clarity-software.com
| 66 | July/August 2026
www.signupdate.co.uk
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