Posted By Dave Merchant
When you say 'costly', are you talking about design of bespoke artwork (like site entry boards etc) or the production costs for the physical items? Producing designs in-house is easy, but you have bigger problems cutting production costs (a UV-fast adhesive vinyl sign is not easy to replace with something run off a laser printer!)

In terms of design there's no need for bespoke software (folks like me who do this kind of thing use the standard packages like Photoshop, Illustrator etc.) and you can download many of the standard pictogram shapes for safety signage as free truetype fonts, enabling you to use them in Word, Powerpoint, etc.) - see www.dafont.com and search for 'warning'. Bespoke software may sound good, but it's a solution looking for a problem and often it's not as flexible as doing things the normal way, or contracting to a graphic designer. Why buy the cow when there are thousands of people selling milk?

It's worth remembering that most stock signs (no smoking, no entry, etc) are produced in bulk, and so are cheaper than print-on-demand either using in-house machines or a commercial print shop.