PRINT Purchasing Guide

PRINT PURCHASING GUIDE All the fun things to keep in mind when getting a project commercially printed STOCK COMPARISON "Stock" is what your project will be printed on, but you could also call it the paper or card. Stock comes ina variety of thicknesses*: FY! GSM (Grams per Square Meter) is directly proportional to thickness. Toilet Paper Newspaper (20gsm) Reflex 100gsm 115gsm 130gsm 150gsm 250gsm 300gsm 310gsm 350gsm 420gsm (48gsm) copy paper (80gsm) Note Pads Posters Letterhead Business Cards Examples of what is printed on the above stocks* Flyers Booklets Bookmarks Presentation Folders Postcards Calendars "note that this is just a sample of our available stocks and products MOST PRINTING ALSO COMES WITH COATING OPTIONS This is almost like choosing what coat you want to wear when you leave the house. Uncoated Varnished Gloss UV Laminated Varnished stock is one of the most common and reasonably priced choices. This is a liquid coating applied to the print job. This is like going out in your comfy jacket - it's what everyone expects and nobody generally comments on it. Varnished stock generally has the options of matte or gloss. Stocks that are laminated are regular run of the mill card that has been layered with plastic on one or both sides. Similar to choosing an awesome rain jacket to wear outside, laminated product is generally impervious to water (and hence ink, so you mostly can't write on laminated product) and particularly cool. Usually comes in gloss Gloss UV is awesome. It's shinier Choosing uncoated stock is like going out on the town in your birthday suit. It's pretty awesome, but does have it's drawbacks. For than a unicorn's horn, and having a print product coated with it is like going to a party in a new leather jacket - people notice and comment. Generally consisting of solids (clay or similar), it's layered onto the stock then cured by exposure to Ultra Violet (UV) radiation. example it's porus and damages reasonably easy. It is nice to feel your fibres exposed to the world though. matte. DIGITAL PRINTING VS OFFSET PRESS Digital Printer Offset Press Offset presses are the more common, dominant printing machines, and they've been around since about 1875. They're big, fast and cost a bunch to run, so companies squeeze as much on to them as possible. Digital printers are cheaper, but slower and don't give quite as high a quality (although that is debatable now). What they are good for, though, is short runs of printing and runs where each copy is a different version (variable printing). Quantity best for: Variable Printing: Speed for full colour: Sheet size: Digital Printing* Short runs (less than 1000 copies) Yes Offset Printing* Long runs (more than 1000 copies) No Up to 275 sheets per minute 700mm x 1000mm (average) Up to 64 pages per minute 640mm x 350mm (average) Print Resolution: Good to Great Great "Note, data is given as an example and printers/presses may vary PRINT PRICING FY Digital Offset Digital printers print with toner (powder), offset presses print with ink (liquid). The cost of printing on an offset press decreases with volume, while the cost per sheet is relatively static on a Digital Printer Volume GANG RUN PRINTING Offset printing costs can be decreased by This isn't a printshop run by the Mafia It's where lots of orders.. .are printed on the same sheet together on a big offset press, then cut apart - this makes it cheaper to do small runs of high quality printing. COMMERCIALLY PRINTED DOCUMENTS NEED TO BLEED Bleed Line - make sure your pretty graphics extend beyond here Because commercially printed documents are printed on one big sheet then cut, you need to give us a little space to cut it properly, right down the line. Otherwise you'll sometimes end up with a white border. That sucks. The edge of your document - where we cut Document This extra space is called bleed, and generally the minimum is 3 - 5mm. Include it. We'l| love you long time for it. 841 mm STANDARD DOCUMENT SIZES 52 m 105 mm 210 mm 420 mm Аб Most of the world uses the ISO standard A series A4 This system starts with A0 which has A5 Letter A2 Legal АЗ an aspect ratio of the square root of 2 (or approximately 1.414) an area of 1 square meter Successive smaller sizes then have exactly half the area of that size. That is, A1 is half A0, A2 is half A1, A3 is half A2, A4 is half A3, A5 is half A4, and A6 is half A5 A1 North America still uses sizes based on inches. Which means their standard sizes include: 3.5"x 2", 2.5" x 2.5", 5.5" x 8.5", 4.25" x 2.75", 5.5" x 2.125", 2" x 8", 4.25" x 3.66", 3" x 4", 4.25" x 5.5", 4*x67, 4" x 4 4.25"x6, 8.5" x 2.75", 8* x 5,6" x 9, 4.25"x 11, 5" x 7, 4"x9, 85"x 166", 8S1.5,8.5"x6, 85" x 11;6"x 1111"x 17, 18'x 24, 19"x 27: 24e" x36. COLOUR Your computer monitor displays colour using a combination of Red, Green and Blue. Commercial Printers all print using a combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. These colour models are hugely different, which can lead to printing errors if you try and print an image that is RGB. Converting between the two can cause colour shift, which is not cool. FY!: References Further Reading Australian DISCOUNT Printing http://www.ookingdom.com/metric/gsm Printing is called lithogra- phy" in the business, literally from the original meaning http://www.omt.com.au/index-1.html http://www.heidelberg.com http://www.hp.com "carved in stone". The first http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size printing presses were carved out of limestone or similar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_coating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coated_paper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleed_%28printing%29 © www.AustralianDiscountPrinting.com.au