A question about printing flyers

Have you tried local printers instead?

Rubies - Do you know exactly how much money? I'm thinking of taking a loan out to buy one. But yes, I'm well aware that it'll cost huge swathes of cash. And 3 of the above 4 companies were local, all slack morons.

Also, that printer up there is probably a bit too advanced for what I need. My partner says the whole pantone stuff is unneccessary for what we want.

Konal - what type of company do you work for and what do you design?

(thanks to everyone for the advice already btw)

Ian I don't handle print jobs much now but used to do all the magazine ads and promo work for an webhosting firm. We used printing.com for a lot of stuff and they weren't too bad. The thing that always used to mess me up was not converting all text to paths.

If a designer works in RGB, don't use them.

You shouldn't have to convert text to paths assuming you include the fonts.

That printer up there isn't that advanced and is not real pantone, it just means it can print colors that look like pantone colors. Even that is a bullshit promise and would still depend on constant callibration. But that's a laser printer, just a big fancy laser printer. The quality of any flyers it would print would look like a laser print, good for some purposes, but not off-set quality. In some ways maybe even a bit better...due to the technology of the toner, you don't get any dot-pattern as you would with any off-set printer.

And whether you're sending out print jobs or planning on being a printer, if you want the colors to look right be prepared to spend tons of money and put in a lot of work.

anyway, I can give more printing advice later when I'm not so busy at work, where I work with design, advertising, pre-press and printing, so I have a bit of experiance with the subject!

The thing above, what that's all about is an outgrowth of fancy color copiers. Design firms and businesses had these huge color copiers then someone figured out how to connect it to a computer network. This requires a RIP, (raster image processor), sometimes its a little internal computer, but mostly it's external. The main company who does this is called EFI, electronic for imaging. These devices can also act as a crappy but big scanner. They're great for printing out stuff in progress, and god knows I've used them for flyers, but they have a distinct "laser" look and feel to them that is just sub-professional.

The step above that is a series of devices that cost a shitload of money, but are good for starting a serious serious serious printing business, stuff like heidelberg eprint or direct print or whatever they call it. Point is, with conventional off-set printing, you have to print film, then from the film you make a plate, then the plate is placed in a press yadda yadda. The newer idea is called Direct to Plate, where you bypass the film and print the plate, and beyond that, these small all-in-one systems (i'll find some info later) where you send the file to the printer and the plate is imaged inside itself and stuff prints out...just like sending to a normal printer, but offset. These are high-quality (relatively) and cost-effective unless you're doing really huge runs, then you want the big press. But I think they are also usually 4c and can't handle Pantone inks or any other kind of special inks. More later.

The Proof is in the....PROOF!

There is nothing more important then the proof. There are different kinds of proofs, in both what they are proofing and how they are doing it. Primarily, either you're proofing for content or color. A proof for layout can be black and white or the colors can be way off, it doesn't matter, you're just making sure the printer got your file and was able to open it correctly...all images are there, all fonts are loaded, if you have pages of type and don't have time to go through it with a fine-tooth comb, just see where the linebreaks are and make sure they match what you supplied. These proofs are often called Blues or Veloxes, which refer to how they were made. It used to be they'd make film from your files, then expose blueprints from the film to check the film. Nowadays, especially with film-less printing, you'd be just as happy if they loaded up your files on their system and printed a laser print and faxed it to you...it's still a Blue. And it's still a valid proof.

Now once you sign off on something, that's the law of the land. Fact is, if you put something on a disk, and include a printout of the layout...a good vendor will check their output to your proof. So be careful. If you print something out. Then right before saving it to disk you realize you spelled something wrong and you change it...and the printer changes it back, that's your fault! Often I'd print color lasers, then make changes, so I'd specify that that color printout was just for pagination and not content, and of course, not for color.

Color proofing? Forget about it! It's all so expensive and anyway, when you send your job to most printers, it's being ganged up with a dozen other client's jobs, you're not getting special attention. Now when the big-boys print, they get to see the first sheet coming off the press and even that late in the game they can say....it's too dark, it's too red whatever, and the pressman can tweak that. They can't fix a typo of course, just big global fixes. This takes place at what's called the Press Check.

Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself. At the very least, you should be able to get decent low-cost color proof of your files. These are usually called Rainbows...again because that's what the printer was called, though now it can be any type of Kodak, Fuji whatever. Most of these devices are just very high quality inkjet printers, or dye sub printers or whatever, but if callibrated and all that, should give you a rough estimate of what it'll look like coming off press. A step above that is a proper Digital Matchprint, in which the printer prints 4 sheets of acetate broken down to the CMYK plates, this process will show you not only relatively accurate offset colors, but will show you the dot-pattern that is created when you separate for offset printing. Rainbows can't do that. Not even super-expensive glicee inkjets like the Iris Indigo, which is more about making the print beautiful then showing what is possible on a press. These digital matchprints still will cost you like 150 bucks for a single 11x17 sheet. I used to work at an ad agency that had their own digital matchprint machine and night-shift dude would run stuff for me for free. Subtle adjustments to the retouching of Glenn Branca's Ascension and to the exact tint of pink used on the Metro Area CD were decided though that. Even then I didn't press my luck. With the Ascension I saved 2 versions and proofed them at the same time to decide.

Anyway...a digital matchprint is a term that comes from the old matchprints, which is where people would expose, by hand, all 4 plates of film onto acetate, then line them up together. As film is being/has been phased out, conventional matchprints I imagine are also history.

Anyway the process should be this. Create your file. Burn it to disk(if not ftp/emailing). Print lasers, however shitty from that. Submit that printout with a disk and a specific note on the laser "layout to match this, proof not for color". Then when the printer gets the disk and loads 'er up, they have to supply you with something. Even if they only make a jpg that you can see onscreen and thus know, yes, fonts are loaded, pictures are hi-res and in the right place etc. Printout the jpg, SIGN IT and fax it back. They have to match that. If they don't, well you ask for your money back or never use them again i guess.

And really just be careful. I thought I was smart on one of the first jobs I handled myself by including a pdf called booklet_proof.pdf as a means to show them the final layout. When I got the rainbows back everything looked good but the art all looked low-res. I finally realized they had printed their color proofs from my PDF. Now I title the pdf DO_NOT_PRINT_booklet_proof.pdf and put it in a folder called "Digital_Proof_DO_NOT_PRINT".

It's not such a suprise as we are moving towards a PDF workflow...a few of the jobs I've done recently I've released just as hi-res pdf. Thing is you better make sure you know what you're doing. When you submit quark or indesign or whatever files, the vendors fix shit, they have to to print it. Don't think your graphic designers know enough about pre-press to supply clean files, especially if they don't know the difference between RGB and CMYK. The future is this thing called PDF X1-A, it's a standard for press-ready hi-res PDFs. Ad/design firms set up print spoolers that basically preflight for you. You have a quark file, hit Print to printer PDF X1-A and 5 minutes later on some server a txt file pops up telling you your quark file is no good.

next...a graphic designer's guide to pre-press.

And if you're very, very lucky, you have to go to say, Spain to do it. AW SHUCKS.

I used to work at S0h0 Letterpress (just for a few months), now I'm back at one of the biggies doing kid's bk production.

re s0h0, I emailed a girl who worked there for a while because I was intrigued about dropping out of doing production at various advertising firms and learning the ancient craft of letterpress. She convinced me otherwise. It wasn't the money or type of work or anything, but she complained of a general sense of not learning other tasks, just doing one thing forever. I mean, if you want to hire some arty kid at few bucks/hr, there should at least be a sense of mentoring/apprenticing or whatever, no? I took one class through CBA at P3t3r Kru7y (i suck at googleproofing!) 2 weekends and it was great, but if you're gonna do letterpress, I think you need more then the occasional night class. One day I'll tell you about my great-grandfathers letterpress shop in cleveland.

A friend letter-pressed our last set of flyers. And yes, they DO look amazing.

For those who want to learn more about letterpress:

http://www.briarpress.org/briarpress/

Define "worth it". Heh. If you know someone who does it, and you have a chance to use it in a really interesting/unorthodox way, TOTALLY. If you're a society princess looking for a status symbol/place to print wedding invites, uhh...depends on how deep daddy's pockets are, I guess.

I rarely go to capones these days, too many memories!...though steinski is spinning with Duane and Doug Lee saturday.

steinski basically invented sampling James Brown.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883624885/sr=8-1/qid=1144467283/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6947976-3231807?%5Fencoding=UTF8

published by International Paper and updated every few years, the Pocket Pal is by no means perfect or even always relevant to what you want to know, but it's a good starter and will introduce many of the basic terms and tecniques. But like anything, it's really something that can only be learned by doing it, doing it wrong, and doing it with people who know how to do it.

this is what I was talking about above. It's not heidelberg but HP, that's why I couldn't find any info. What makes these presses so special is that you don't have to make plates and put them in a big press, you just send it your file and it prints it, and unlike all the cheaper digital printers which are all basically laser printers, this uses Ink in an offset manner instead of toner, so while laser prints often look really sharp and beautiful...they look like laser prints, whereas this looks like something printed professionally. Cons: I don't think they're quite as high quality as a proper press, but not that someone making little flyers would notice, and if you do HUGE print runs, it's not cost effective.

Maybe you should just start a cool silkscreen company.

http://www.kayrock.org/
http://www.seripop.com/

You can't print just normal photos and stuff, but you can do some cool stuff and it's probably the cheapest/easiest type of printing you can get into. And it's way punk rock.

OK, London printing experts, HALP!!!

I need to print a small run (50 to 100) of full colour A3 posters, within a week. Good quality (I'd like recycled) paper, for Fillmore style collectable gig posters.

Anywhere cheaper than this?

http://www.solopress.com/index.php?content=shop/prices&category_id=74

(£175 seems to be their cheapest option.)

Oh, I'm not very good at googling. There seem to be loads cheaper options. I'd really like to use someone that someone else has had any experience with?

Should I believe the environmental hype?

http://www.alocalprinter.com/

WHATEVER YOU DO, NEVER EVER EVER USE THAT "A LOCAL PRINTER" UP THERE /\

It's Wednesday night, the afternoon of the show, no posters. Despite telling me on the phone that if I got them the artwork on Thursday and the approval on Friday, that I could have them within the two days the advertise on the website.

I'm £60 out of pocket over this. And stuck with a pile of useless paper come tomorrow.

I have these guys bookmarked, but I've never used them: http://www.blunt-print.com/

Thanks for the info - but unless they can print and deliver 50 full colour copies to London in 2 hours, I'm still screwed. :-(

Nat says we can take money and addresses out tonight, and try to do mail order for the rest. Bah.