Ink on paper still rules at a 50-year Everett blueprint shop

EVERETT — Print isn’t yet dead at this 50-year-old business.

While industries increasingly are turning to digital documents and displays, the local construction industry is still largely dependent on printed plans, said Eric Watt, owner of Bill’s Blueprint in Everett.

“Our primary customers are still architects and engineers,” said Watt, the firm’s second-generation owner.

On the job, paper blueprints are also the medium of choice.

“We’re not seeing guys in the field swinging a hammer and holding an iPad — they still have their plans,” Watt said.

“But I do think that’s going to change,” he said.

Blueprints were a nineteenth-century innovation that replaced hand-traced and hand-drawn architectural and technical drawings.

The chemical process produced white lines on a blue background.

By the 1940s, a simpler printing process that used fewer toxic chemicals replaced the older method and reversed their appearance to blue lines on a white background.

However, the name blueprint stuck, Watt said.

Watt’s father, Bill Watt, founded Bill’s Blueprint in 1969 after knocking on doors and asking potential Everett-area customers if they would support a local blueprint shop.

In the mid-1960s, Bill was a salesman for a Seattle printing company, and his sales territory included Everett.

At the time, local architects and engineers sent their printing orders to Seattle, Bill said.

The time to pick-up and deliver could add two or three days to the job, he said.

Determining who your customers are — and if they’ll support your business — is an important question today, small business experts say.

With the promise of a $2,300 order from an Everett architectural firm, Bill Watt rented a hole-in-the wall office at 1718 Hewitt Ave. and bought a $2,000 blueprint machine.

“I ran all weekend on that one job,” he said.

It also helped that Bill’s wife, Jan, knew how to run the blueprint machine.

For years, she did the books and ran the printing machines while Bill focused on sales and marketing.

In the mid-1970s, the shop moved to its current location at 2920 Rockefeller Ave.

Twenty years ago, Eric Watt took over the business. His first brush with his father’s business began when he was 15 years old.

“I would deliver prints on a bicycle around town, in the summer and after school,” Watt said.

Today the shop employs 12 people, including Eric Watt’s wife, Mykel, who keeps track of the finances.

This summer, Eric Watt’s son, Conner, 17, and daughter, Sydney, 20, joined their father and mother in the shop.

In the past decade, color ink jet printers have become the new standard, replacing older plans that could only display black or blue lines on white paper.

Color blueprints with red, green, blue and orange lines are reducing errors and revisions in the construction industry, Watt said.

Different colors allow all the schematics to be printed on one sheet, which is easier on the human eye and brain, Watt said.

“You can see all the systems — mechanical, electrical, plumbing — on one piece of paper,” he said.

If a pipe needs to be moved, you can see quickly and clearly which structures and systems are going to be affected, he said.

But color isn’t the last word.

Fortune magazine reported last year that the construction industry — arriving late to the party — has begun using digital plans.

Other industries made the move 10, 20, even 30 years ago, including the aerospace industry. In the early 1990s, Boeing designed its first paperless airplane, the twin-aisle Boeing 777. Computer-aided design software gave designers and engineers the ability to model, adjust and scale aircraft components on a screen.

Are blueprints and blueprint shops on the verge of extinction?

“It’s something that I’m always looking at. My customers here in Everett still require paper,” he said, and then added, “I need paper to stick around for 10 more years — to get my kids through college.”

Janice Podsada; jpodsada@heraldnet.com; 425-339-3097; Twitter: JanicePods