Rock Posters Thornbury facility
More than 1,000 visitors toured the Rock Posters factory in Thornbury during Open House Melbourne 2026, and the biggest queue formed around a printing method the industry has largely abandoned. Rock Posters has been screen printing street posters since 1986. The refurbished SIAS automatic clamshell press at its Thornbury workshop still runs commercial jobs today, alongside a darkroom that has outlived the technology it was built for. Visitors during Open House Melbourne were repeatedly surprised by how far the process sits from standard printing in 2026, and how rare it has become. The press handles work up to 1500mm x 1000mm, on stock ranging from 100gsm street poster paper through to 5mm corflute. It earns its place commercially in the areas digital cannot reach: fluoro colour outside the standard CMYK gamut, heavier ink coverage, and the physical character of a screen-printed finish. RMIT has its art show street posters screen printed most years. The process is deliberately slow. Screens are coated with emulsion in the darkroom, colours are separated and printed onto film positives, each screen is exposed under UV and washed out, then every colour is printed in a separate pass. A two-colour poster means two full passes through the press.
“If you want to keep the print cost down, you’ve got to build the whole poster out of two colours, and that forces designers to work out how to get the most from the ones they choose. It’s always interesting to see what people come up with,” Luke Stewart, Artwork & Production Manager at Rock Posters commented.
That constraint is part of the appeal for designers. Every additional colour adds a screen, preparation time and cost, which pushes creative teams to get more out of a limited palette.
“There’s a saying among traditional tattooers, bold will hold,” Stewart commented.”I take the same principle to street posters. Bold imagery, great contrasting colours, and the thing works on the street.”
The work sits inside a growing category. Out-of-home advertising net media revenue reached $385 million in Q2 2026, up 5.58 per cent, according to the Outdoor Media Association. Rock Posters has published a full account of the press, the process and its history in the Street Blog at rockposters.com.au.