Searles Graphics - Printing http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/category/10/Printing en-US http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3661/A-New-Marketers-Guide-to-Buying-Print-The-Messengers A New Marketer’s Guide to Buying Print - The Messengers In this episode of The Messengers podcast, Chris Searles and Rob Seifert discuss the basics of buying printing. For many people, even the basics of printing can be a foreign concept, which can leave business owners either overpaying for what they need or with a lower-quality final product than they had originally envisioned.


Chris and Rob discuss the most important things you need to know when going to buy printing for your company to help you end up with a piece that’s right for your business. This episode covers items like:


- What is “stock” and how can you select the right one?
- How a number of factors affect your “price-per-piece”
- Bleed and trim safety
- Working with designers that are familiar with print production

Use the links below to watch or listen, and don’t forget to subscribe to get more from The Messengers on your favorite device or streaming service!


Spotify

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Google Podcasts

Pocket Casts

Google Play Music

Anchor

SoundCloud

Stitcher

 

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3369/The-Beginners-Guide-to-Buying-Printing-for-Your-New-Business The Beginner's Guide to Buying Printing for Your New Business There are a lot of things to think about when you’re starting a new business. Often, it’s the small things that people forget to include in their plans and budgets.

It may not seem like it, but items like business cards, letterhead, and envelopes can start to add up and bring costs you might not have anticipated.

I recently worked on a proposal for a new hedge fund that didn’t have a great idea of exactly what printed staples and stationery they were going to need and looked to us for guidance on where to start.

It’s not the first time I’ve had that conversation so I thought it would be a good idea to write up a guide for entrepreneurs and small business owners to help with the process, provide some ideas you may not be thinking about, and make sure you cover your bases during your initial planning stages.

Business Cards

Business cards are a basic staple for any business owner. Even the most technical of businesses and business owners need business cards.

Anybody that’s been doing it long enough has found themselves in the unfortunate position of meeting someone unexpectedly and not having a card to easily provide contact information for a follow up.

Cell phone and tablet batteries die, and there’s still not a great way to easily and quickly share contact info digitally during an in-person meeting.

Not only that, but business cards represent such a minimal investment that there’s simply no excuse not to have one.

My advice for your card is either go all out and make it something memorable that will get shared around, or keep it simple and classy. I always opt for the latter:

Chris Searles, Searles Media business card

If you’re just getting started, it’s important to identify the people in your organization that will need a card.

Anybody that has direct client contact or does business development should absolutely have a business card. But that should be obvious.

Don’t skimp on the rest of your employees though. My general rule of thumb is if you have a desk, you get a business card.

There’s a good reason for this. Imagine for a second you just took a new job with a company or potentially even took a risk to leave a steady job to work for a startup.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a box of shiny new business cards with your name and the company’s logo on them?

Business cards in a box

It may seem like a small thing, and it is, but sometimes the little things produce the best results. And the small things do matter.

As far as sourcing business cards, that depends on a number of factors.

First, pay the money to have a professional design your cards. A great option is using the designer that created your logo.

It’s a very small investment that makes a very big difference in the long run.

For printing, there are now a number of websites that sell business cards extremely cheap in small quantities.

A simple Google search for terms like “business cards” or “buy business cards online” will yield more options than you’ll ever need.

Buy business cards online Google search results

These options are ok if you need 500 of a single card or two and quality isn’t your paramount concern.

There have been times when we’ve purchased business cards online for clients because it was simply the best option for them under the circumstances, but we are always prepared to send back the first set that are delivered (and do in more than 50% of the instances where we go this route), and sometimes even more than that.

If want higher quality or better service, or you simply want to look at paper samples so you know what you’re buying, get a price from your local print shop.

Simply Google “[my location] printing companies” and you should get a good list to start with. You want a commercial printer that offers sheet-fed offset or digital printing services.

Higher quantities are where they’ll start to be more competitive in price or simply offer you the options or service that you can’t get online.

Online printers vs local printers

One way to save money when you anticipate needing a large number of cards over a longer period of time (i.e. you frequently have new employees coming in and/or you have others who run out all at different times) is to have your printer run shells and inventory them for you, and then imprint individual cards as needed.

Generally, the way this works is they will run the standard company info that’s the same on every card either in 2 or 4-colors on an offset press in a large quantity.

Then, whenever someone in your organization places an order, the printer will simply take a stack of the shells and run them through a digital press in black and white (which is cheaper than color) to imprint the person’s name and contact information.

Business card shells

Letterhead

Letterhead is another staple every business needs to be able to pull out of a drawer at a moment’s notice.

You probably won’t go through nearly as much of it as you used to, but it’s amazing how many times you’ll get a request for something that has to be “on company letterhead.”

Search results for the exact phrase "on company letterhead"

It’s also a really nice way to reach out to clients or prospects. There’s still something to be said for being able to hold something tangible in your hands (and there’s data that shows it actually influences buying decisions quite positively).

You have a lot of the same options with letterhead as you do for your business cards, and my advice is largely the same.

Pay a professional for design, I promise it matters and is well worth the minor investment you need to make.

Price out online and local print shops with the same caveats included in the business card section above.

In general, online is better for short-runs where quality is secondary and you are willing to buy blind. Go local if you want someone to work with you to provide the best solution for you and your business based on their experience.

Neither is the right or wrong option, one is simply better for your business and your unique situation and requirements.

(If you’re unsure, reach out to me and I’d be happy to help you make the right call.)

In either case, your designer and your printer (even better if it’s the same company!) should work with you to design your piece in a way that’s both cost-effective and represents your brand well.

Your design should also be consistent with the rest of your marketing and promotional materials, so it helps to use a single designer for all of these items unless you’re in the process of rebranding and are purposely looking for a change.

Pepsi logo history

For printing, you have three primary options: One-color, two-color, and four-color. Yes, there are other options but there’s most likely no reason to consider any of them for letterhead.

If you’re doing a short run, you’ll only save money going from four-color to one-color, and only if that one color is black.

Ford Model T Any Colour

Digital presses (where most short print runs go) only offer price breaks for black ink, everything else prints in full color which costs the printer the same amount as if you put a nice full-color picture on it.

On the other hand, if you’re doing a slightly larger run (usually around 1,000 pieces or more), there might be a very large difference between four-color and two- or one-color printing.

Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules to this and specific breaks are completely dependent on the type of equipment your printing company has.

This is when it’s important to discuss your goals with your printer and your designer to ensure you get what you need.

High quality, low price, or something in the middle can all be had, just be open and honest about your needs and your budget and the right partners should be able to accommodate you well.

Envelopes

The world of envelopes is a lot bigger than you probably realize.

Boxes of envelopes

They come in an almost incalculable number of sizes, styles, colors, weights, and options.

Square flaps, peel and stick, single window, double window, remittance, #10, #9, A6, A7, A2, bright white, natural white, catalogs, booklets, 24 lb., 60 lb. - coincidentally those last two happen to be the same thing (read this if you want to know why)  … the list goes on and on.

So I’m going to simplify it.

Get yourself some non-window #10 envelopes with your logo and return address on them.

#10 envelopes will fit a standard 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper (folded in thirds) and are the most basic, versatile, and oft-used envelope there is.

Once again, you have options for ink colors.

Black is always the cheapest but you can choose a single PMS color that’s not black and still save money.

Two-color printing certainly won’t break the bank either, usually you would run two brand colors or one PMS color and black (your logo designer did give you a two-color version of your logo, right?).

Four-color envelopes can be had inexpensively at lower quantities (a few thousand or so) where they can run on a digital press instead of a four-color offset press.

Believe it or not, I often prefer a two- or three-color envelope over a four-color because the PMS colors can really pop.

1-color, 2-color, and 3-color envelope examples

But if your logo is a little more complicated and doesn’t translate well to two-color (first, find yourself a new designer, then) spring for the four-color. It’s worth the minor increase in cost.

If you’re doing long runs, usually it’s for a specific purpose like a direct mail piece, at which point you should talk with your designer and your printer about the goals of the piece as well as price differences on color and size options, then decide if it’s necessary or worth it to do more than just a black outer envelope.

Beyond a standard #10, you may also want to consider #10 window envelopes.

If you send out a lot of invoices (hopefully you will!), these are nice and easy to just fold up an invoice that already has the customer's name and address on it and pop it in the mail without needing to address the outer envelope.

#10 envelope vs #10 window envelopes

Usually these are the envelopes you’ll send checks in, and you likely may not need anything printed on them at all (that’s what the windows are for).

Buy them from your printer, if you have a good relationship with them you can take advantage of their buying power and get better pricing than if you just went to Staples or Sam’s Club (even after a reasonable markup for their time, handling, and service of course).

Finally, I would consider a larger envelope like a 9” x 12” or 9.5” x 12.5” (which one would depend on your intended use, see the section on pocket folders below for more).

Often, if you’re sending marketing materials or other promotional items, the last thing you want to do is fold them up and stuff them in a little envelope.

These envelopes give you the option to send your materials flat, and for the added $1 (or less) in postage, the value you get out of the presentation is well worth it.

All you need to know about these (besides which size you should buy to fit what you're putting inside) is the difference between a catalog and a booklet envelope.

Catalog envelopes open on the short edge, booklets open on the long edge.

Catalog envelopes vs booklet envelopes

Pocket Folders

These are an option you should consider, but be sure you have a reason to order them before you do.

Pocket folders are a basic print staple of a lot of businesses because of their versatility.

They allow you to change your materials frequently, print out customized proposals for customers, include new brochures you’ve created since you had the folders printed, and anything else you can’t think of right now that you may want to include or use them for in the future.

They’re a great way to present contracts, agreements, proposals, etc.

Obviously, if you run a retail store, you may have no need for a pocket folder, but if you have a B2B business or work with large projects where spending a couple dollars on presentation can go a long way towards getting a five or six-figure project, it’s a good start.

You have just as many (if not more) options with these as you do with all of your other printing, but a good place to start is a standard 9” x 12” folder with two 4” pockets and a single business card slit.

For professional services, the most common option is a nice, heavy cotton or linen stock with a simple one- or two-color logo in the middle on the front cover.

Pocket folder examples

You can get a lot of legs out of a metallic ink, or if you want to spend a little more money and like the look, a gold or silver foil stamp process. Neither are necessary though.

If you’re trying to build a brand, your logo alone may not be enough to really leave a mark so you may want to include a tag-line or some imagery on the folder, just be sure not to make it so busy that the message gets lost in the shuffle.

Notepads

I’m going to let you in on a 40+ year secret here … custom notepads are one of the single best promotional items you'll ever find.

We’ve used them for decades and they’re an amazing way to keep your brand in front of prospects and clients.

Searles Graphics notepads

Everyone at some point throughout their day or week needs a piece of paper to write on.

That means they sit on top of a desk, on a conference table, at reception, or at arm’s reach all the time.

When a note is written, it’s kept for a while or passed along to someone else who can’t help but see your logo and what you do. Sometimes a single note or message can last weeks in full view every minute of every day.

It’s hard to buy that kind of frequency with any other advertising or promotional product; plus there's the added benefit that everybody else isn't doing the same thing.

When it comes to notepads, you don’t have to go crazy. Four-color pads are great if you have a need but the same rules as discussed in the envelope section above apply here.

As for paper, 50 lb. offset is all you really need. Anything heavier than that is nice but overkill.

Talk to your local printer or check out CorporateNotepads.com for options.

CorporateNotepads.com homepage screenshot

Full disclosure, this is a website we own, but I share it with you because we were able to figure out a way to get the prices crazy low so I figured I’d share it with you because it’s worth at least taking a look at.

And there you have it, everything you need to at least get yourself started with your printing needs.

Yes, you will have some unique requirements that I haven’t discussed and you’ll definitely want more than just the basics shortly, but this is just the beginner’s guide!

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3347/Direct-Mail-Outperforms-Email-for-Purchase-Decisions Direct Mail Outperforms Email for Purchase Decisions In a recent study conducted by Temple University comparing the relative effectiveness of digital advertising vs direct mail advertising, researchers concluded that direct mail had a deeper and longer-lasting impact than email advertising.

Researchers showed test subjects a variety of 40 email and postcard advertisements and measured the subjects' responses in a variety of ways in an effort to determine whether one medium showed a significant advantage over the other for marketers. Eye tracking technology was used to visual attention in reaction to predetermined areas of interest. Biometric sensors measured heart rate, sweat levels, motion, and respiration to monitor the level of emotional engagement with the ad. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to pinpoint deep brain activity to measure more brain activity that's thought to influence purchase behavior more than surface activity (e.g. empathy and reward).

The results of the study showed the physical, direct mail ads outperformed or equaled their digital counterparts in all but one of the nine areas measured. The direct mail pieces outperformed the email ads in the areas of:

  • Review Time - The amount of time a customer spends with an ad.
  • Stimulation - An emotional reaction to an ad.
  • Memory Speed & Confidence - Quickly and confidently remember advertising source and content.
  • Desirability - A subconscious desire for the product or service.
  • Valuation - The subconscious value a participant places on the product or service.

The study found the following three areas performed equivalently for both the direct mail and email marketing pieces:

  • Engagement - The amount of information a customer processes or absorbs from an ad.
  • Memory Retrieval Accuracy - Accurately remembering the advertising source and content.
  • Purchase and Willingness to Pay - Whether and how much the customer is willing to pay for a product.

The digital ads were found to be superior in gaining a subject's focused attention on key parts of the ad for a sustained period of time.

As the study notes, self-reported survey results demonstrated little difference between participants' preferences for digital ads vs phsyical advertisements, however the physical ads had a longer-lasting impact than the digital ads. And while the participants stated similar preferences and willingness to pay for an item regardless of the medium it was presented in, their brain activity indicated a greater subconscious value and desire for products and services advertised in a physical format. It goes on to note, "Previous research indicated that activity in this portion of the brain (the ventral striatum), responsible for valuation and desirability, was a strong predictor of purchases, which merits further research."

There are certainly some caveats to note here. The first is that this is a single study, and although it was conducted independently at Temple University, it was commissioned by the Postal Service Inspector General's Office. It's also a study representing a sample size of 59 people, with 39 of those participating in the follow-up study a week later. This is hardly a significant portion of the population and it would be good to see these results replicated before jumping to any major conclusions. Finally, while 40 different ads should represent a significant variance in content, design, and structure, each of these items can play a huge factor in engagement and response rates which needs to be 

The take away here is not that you should ditch your digital efforts and switch everything back to print, or that the caveats noted above completely negate some legitimate and interesting findings. Both mediums have advantages and disadvantages (as found in this study), and as we've always stressed, it's critical to use a varied marketing mix to reach your customers and prospects in a way that proves to be most effective for your business, industry, product, and individual clients.

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http://www.searles.media/blog/3328/What-Are-Ad-Blockers-and-Why-Should-You-Care What Are Ad Blockers and Why Should You Care? If you're not familiar with ad blockers, you're now in the minority. Ad blockers are extensions you can install for your browser that, well, block ads.

The technology has varying degrees of success based on exactly which ads you don't want to see. Although they may not be flawless in their pursuit of an ad-free experience, they are extremely effective. In fact, ad blockers have become so good that for the first time ever Facebook recognized ad blocking technology as a significant risk factor to it's business model in their annual 10-K filing.

Interest in ad blockers was relegated to techies for a long time and remained relatively stagnant from 2005 until mid 2012. However, beginning mid-2012, interest in ad blocking technology has exploded and ad blockers have now gone mainstream.

If you read my stuff regularly and atually listen to my advice, you should only be mildly concerned about the affect this may have on your business. Why? Because I am constantly urging you to create original, compelling content, increase your organic search results, think of your business as a media company regardless of what you sell, and to continue (or begin) to invest in print marketing.

By creating unique, compelling content, you're giving people something they want to see rather than annoying them with an ad they want to block.

Optimizing your website for organic search to increase your search engine rankings means you're oging to be found when someone is looking for you, whether or not they have an ad blocker installed.

Investing in print means giving a client or prospect something they don't have the ability not to see. There's no such thing as an ad filter for the United States Postal Service, and if you're using print effectively, you should be sending something your recipient wants to see anyway.

Thinking of your business as a media company means learning how to be an amazing storyteller (or hiring someone to help). By telling a story instead of pushing a product, you can continually reinforce who you are and what your brand stands for. And by doing it extremely well, you're entertaining instead of annoying, and hopefully creating something people want to talk about and share.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3325/Whats-the-Difference-Between-Sheet-Fed-and-Web-Printing What's the Difference Between Sheet-Fed and Web Printing? Here at Searles Graphics we've traditionally run sheetfed offset presses. Within the last decade we've invested heavily in digital printing as well. One thing we've never offered is web printing. Most consumers don't have any idea what type of printing press the finished piece they're looking at ran on. Luckily, you won't be one of those after reading this ;-).

I've written about digital printing and I've written about offset printing so please check those articles out to get an idea for the differences between the two, and know that both offset and digital printing provide options for sheet fed and web presses, with the primary advantages and disadvantages of both being similar.

If you follow Searles Graphics on social media or have been on our website before, you've no doubt seen pictures and video of our sheet-fed presses in action. The primary difference between web presses and sheet-fed presses is that web presses feed off of a large roll of paper, while sheet-fed presses feed individual sheets of paper.

Ok, you're asking, "So what? Why is their a difference and what does that mean to me?" Easy, I'm getting there ...

All paper is manufactured in rolls. As such, there is a cost involved in sheeting paper; that is, the process of taking a large roll of paper, slicing it into individual sheets of a certain size, and stacking and/or packaging those sheets. This makes purchasing sheets of paper more expensive than purchasing rolls.

It's also slower and more difficult to feed sheets into a press than it is to continuously feed a roll.

All that being said, in order to produce a finished product, that giant roll of paper needs to be cut, folded, and bound just the same. The difference is in where this occurs in the process.

On a web press, printing, folding, and sheeting all happens in line. After all, those rolls of paper are extremely heavy, so moving them from place to place is both cost prohibitive and difficult, so it's important to only have to do that once, rather than in between each step in the process. This video is of a monster Manroland heatset web press:

As a result, once a web press is running, the printing, folding, and sheeting/sheet handling process is significantly faster, reducing overhead and production times.

On the other hand, all that functionality comes at a cost. Web presses are larger, heavier, more expensive, costlier to maintain, and require far more in terms of infrastructure and power requirements. Some large web presses are so loud while running that they need to be run inside specially-designed sound-dampening enclosures.

Having all of that functionality inline also means that if one thing goes wrong anywhere in the process, the entire process can come to a screeching halt, so downtime is far more impactful on operating costs. With sheet-fed, downtime on a folder or cutter doesn't stop your press from running, and it's far less expensive to have a backup in place and ready to go.

Make-ready costs and waste are also much higher with web printing than with sheet-fed because of the size and complexity of the press. Here's a video of a sheet-fed Heidelberg press:

Similar to the differences between digital and offset printing, all of these trade-offs in cost and speed have break-even points where the speed of production more than makes up for the added costs. Essentially, longer runs tend to be more economical on web presses vs sheet fed (think newspapers and jobs requiring hundreds-of-thousands of impressions as a general idea, but be sure to talk to a printer about your specific needs).

Here's a good overview of the cost structure of a printing job, especially as it pertains to economies of scale. ]

Finally, there's the difference in the finished product. All that speed comes with trade-offs in quality. No matter how you put it on a sheet, ink needs to be applied wet and allowed to dry. With sheet-fed presses, ink is either allowed to dry naturally over time as it absorbs into the sheet, or the sheet itself is coated with a laminate and then dried through a heating unit on it's way to being delivered to the end of the press.

With web presses, because the folding process occurs inline and at such a high speed, it's critical to expedite the drying process.

Traditional or "cold" web presses only work with uncoated paper. Without a coating on the sheet, the ink is able to absorb into the sheet to dry. This is the newsprint you're used to when you read the newspaper. It's not an ideal process as is evident from the remnants you undoubtedly end up with on your hands after handling newsprint.

The other option is heatset web printing, which is the process used for the major publications you see every day on the magazine rack. Heatset web printing can be used on both coated and uncoated stocks.

On a heatset web press, after the roll passes through the impression units, it is run through an oven that dries the ink on top of the paper before it's absorbed into the sheet. This lack of absorbtion (mostly on coated stocks) yields a glossy shine, and it's also why the ink is more likely to rub off onto your fingers if you hold onto the page too long (anybody that's ever read a magazine on the beach or by the pool in the summer can attest to that!).

As a side note, it's also common for the covers of some magazines or catalogs to be printed on sheet-fed presses as a high-quality wrapper around lower-quality interior pages that are printed on a web press.

One final drawback of heatset web printing is a phenomenon known as fluting. Fluting doesn't happen on every job, but when it does, it's problematic. Drying ink at such high temperatures also affects the paper, which contains moisture. The heat draws moisture out of the sheet, which actually causes the paper to shrink. Depending on the amount of ink coverage on the piece, some parts of the sheet will lose more moisture than others, causing a sort of ripple, or wave effect on the page.

All of this brings us to some basic realizations. If quality is of the utmost importance and/or you're not doing very large quantities, sheetfed printing is usually your best option. If quantity and speed are the primary factors, web printing is generally the way to go.

One final caveat to all of this ... technology is constantly getting better across the board. So just as the quality of web printing has gotten significantly better over the years, so too has the speed of sheetfed printing, blurring the lines a lot more than ever before. The job that used to only be feasible on a web press might be able to run on a sheetfed press now, and the high-quality job you couldn't afford to do on a sheetfed press and didn't want to do on a web press could be a possibility on a modern heatset web press.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3317/Our-Latest-Innovation-Launches-Today-and-Its-a-Big-One Our Latest Innovation Launches Today and It's a Big One! We continue to innovate and provide new products and services to our clients at a pace unmatched in our industry! I could tell you all about what we're launching today, but I figure it's much better to just show you. Watch the video below and prepare for something you've never seen before.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3308/Weve-Gone-Postal-and-We-Want-Your-Direct-Mail-Business We've Gone Postal and We Want Your Direct Mail Business! Investing in our customers and our business has always been our top priority. Every move we make here is an attempt to somehow provide more value to our clients than you will find anywhere else. That's why I'm happy to announce our most recent investment in our direct mail capabilities.

We've offered a limited amount of mailing services to our clients for a number years now. Most of these were for EDDM and saturation mailings and we helped you to organize anything more complex than that with third party vendors. Last week, however, we installed a new addressing system to complete our service offerings for direct mail and we're happy to announce that we're now a USPS certified Full Service Intelligent Mail Service Provider!

What does that mean? It means we can handle any of your direct mail needs completely in-house here at Searles Graphics from now on. In just our first two weeks up and running we'll already have processed well over 100,000 mail pieces, and that's just the beginning!

Why are we doubling down on direct mail in this age of technology and digital marketing? Anybody that's spent any time talking about business or marketing with me or follows this blog knows that I'm a huge fan of direct mail marketing right now. There is such a huge opportunity in print and direct mail for small businesses right now; opportunity that hasn't existed in those mediums in a long time. As more and more stragglers finally get caught up on their digital marketing efforts, there is a gaping hole in direct mail and print that your business should be filling.

With that, we're ready to help you design and implement a direct mail strategy that complements the rest of your print, search, video, and social marketing campaigns (we can help with those too, you know ;-) and drives more revenue for your organization.

As always, use whatever method you prefer to get in touch with me (Twitter, Instagram, email ... ) or click here to contact us so we can talk about how we can bring value to your organization.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3297/Why-We-Dont-Price-Match-in-a-Price-Competitive-Industry Why We Don't Price Match in a Price-Competitive Industry The printing industry isn't what it used to be. There's no denying that. While I absolutely still believe there are tremendous opportunities in print media for smart marketers right now, it's hard to argue that anybody is or should be doing more total print volume now than the same size business was doing 20 years ago.

So a market correction is a natural occurrence. Especially in an industry where equipment costs run into the millions of dollars for a single printing press, there was and is a tremendous amount of pressure to keep those presses running. A solid industry with good margins and plenty of work for everybody turned into a cutthroat battle over who could sell what they had at the cheapest price to keep the machinery running and their people busy.

High-volume print shops traditionally operated on three eight-hour shifts per day, seven days a week. Their pricing and business models were built on that kind of volume, so the investments these printing companies made were based on a press that operated 24/7. As volumes decreased, rather than trying to adjust to the marketplace, many printers simply continued to slash prices in a desperate attempt to preserve a dying business model.

Here on Long Island printers have done the same, and we've seen the carnage that has resulted, both in the print industry itself and, more importantly, in what it's done to their customers. Sure, it was hard for a little while watching a few (but fortunately not many) good clients jump ship because they were offered a price they couldn't refuse. But while we were busy changing, adapting, and maintaining our quality of work and service, most of those Long Island printing companies either are no longer with us or they're barely hanging on with no ability to produce quality work because they slashed expenses to the bone to support a pricing model that's not sustainable.

Happily, just about any client that's ever left us for price reasons has returned because they realized that with printing, as with everything else, you get what you pay for. Somebody that cares only about price will always only care about price, regardless of the service you provide. That means the only thing you can ever do to keep that customer happy is be the cheapest. The minute you're not the cheapest, they'll find a competitor that is.

This business philosophy can work, Walmart is an amazingly successful company. But there's only one Walmart, and you can't out-Walmart Walmart, as the saying goes. Target, on the other hand, found a way to compete with Walmart by offering high-end design at mass scale. This allowed for lower prices than people were used to paying for similar items, but prices that were still higher than Walmart.

Some people are willing to pay for quality, but not all people. Some people are willing to pay for amazing service, but not all people. Some people are willing to pay for outstanding reliability, but not all people. And some people simply want the lowest price possible without regard for quality, service, or reliability - but not all people. Somewhere in there is where you need to find your niche. We don't compete on price because we know that to do so would compromise the outstanding quality, service, and reliability our customers have come to know and expect from us. And once you take your business down that road, there's no coming back.

That doesn't mean we're never the lowest price (we often are, or are at least close enough for it not to matter), or even that we don't make concessions every once in a while for great clients when they need it (we do). It just means that we're confident that those who value quality, service, and reliability will happily pay a reasonable price for those attributes, and that we need to charge what we need to charge to offer that to our customers. We've built our business on the simple philosophy that we offer the absolute best value anywhere. We don't have a single competitor that provides higher quality or better service at our price point, and that's something we're simply unwilling to compromise on.

If you have a sustainable business model that allows you to always be the cheapest option, go for it. There are definitely customers out there that will find you and work with you. But if your business is built on more than just price, be confident that there are customers who also value what you bring to the table. If you find that you need to steeply discount your products and services just to stay in business, you've not done a good enough job establishing why you're worth a bit of a price premium. If that's the case, spend your time finding out where you're falling short and working to improve in those areas to show your customers why they have no choice but to work with you.

Stand for something meaningful and live or die by it.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3282/Introducing-CorporateNotepadscom Introducing CorporateNotepads.com! Anybody that's worked with us for any amount of time knows about our notepads. We've been producing them for ourselves for decades now and they're one of the best marketing tools we use. While we've always printed notepads for clients, it's not something we've ever really pushed. That changes today!

Today we launched a new custome notepad service at CorporateNotepads.com. The goal is to provide the same amazing marketing tool we've always used to other businesses in a simple and convenient package where you can complete an order in minutes.

Notepads are an amazing marketing and promotional item for a number of reasons. First, everybody uses a scratchpad / notepad at home and at work. Whether you're writing a to do list, a shopping list, taking a message for someone, writing a reminder for yourself, or you just need pen and paper to work something out, you always need a place to write notes.

At the same time, marketing is mostly about keeping your brand in front of prospects. What better way to do that then to have your logo, name, and contact information on the notepads that are kept on someone's desk or coffee table? Not only does that person constantly see your brand, but so does everyone that gets a message, list, or note from that individual.

People spend a lot of money on promotional items that don't work very well because they have no utility. But how many times have you been caught with a pen but nothing to write on so you scramble to scratch a note out on anything you can find? You're not the only one.

So for everyone that's a regular reader here, a customer of ours, a follower of mine, or just passing through, please take a look at our new site, corporatenotepads.com and give it a test drive. Even if you decide not to buy (but you definitely should), I'd love to get your feedback. Call me, tweet to me, email me, message me on Instagram, contact me through my website, contact me through Searles Graphics' website ... whatever works best for you!

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3259/Printing-Basics-What-Does-the-Weight-of-Paper-Mean Printing Basics: What Does the Weight of Paper Mean? If you're not experienced in buying printing (and even if you are), the terminology we use can be difficult to understand at time. In the past we've written about things like saddle-stitching, 4-color printing, offset printing, PMS color matching, digital printing, image resolutions for print, variable data printing, and perfect binding to help give you a better understanding of the basics of print media. But all of these processes would be nothing without the substrate they're printed on. The stock (paper) you choose for your print job matters a lot and can make or break a commercial print job.

We often hear terms like "thick card stock" or "poster board" but the problem with those terms is that they're subjective and somewhat meaningless. What we consider thick may not be thick enough for you, and you can make a poster out of just about anything. Like most problems, however, there's a solution - although it might not be as simple as you're hoping.

When we talk about paper weights, we're really talking about is what we call the basis weight of that stock. The basis weight of paper is how much (in pounds) 500 sheets of that particular stock weighs in that paper's basic sheet size. Pretty simple, right? Well, here's where things start to get tricky.

For some reason (that was decided well before my time), different types of paper have a different basic sheet size. I'm going to discuss the three that are most common for you to see today (stocks like tag and index are far less common these days so we're going to leave those out for simplicity).

The three most common types of paper you'll see or hear about from your printer are bond, text, and cover weights. It should be noted that while bond and offset used to be quite different, these days they're essentially completely interchangeable and most mills no longer even distinguish between the two, they make one stock and either call it a bond or an offset. However, because they label it one way or the other, we still need to talk about both because the weights are very different depending which way they've chosen to label it.

The basic sheet size of bond is 17" x 22", text is 25" x 38", and cover is 20" x 26". The three most common weights of bond are 20 lb., 24 lb., and 28 lb., which correlate exactly to offset (uncoated text) weights of 50 lb., 60 lb., and 70 lb., respectively (i.e. 20 lb. bond = 50 lb. offset). For cover stocks, 60 lb, 65 lb, 80 lb. and 100 lb. tend to be the most common weights. Once you go higher than 100 lb. cover, the weights that are available are very dependent on the actual stock, with values anywhere like 111 lb. (don't ask me why) and 130 lb.

As if that wasn't enough to confuse you, here's where things really get interesting. Although we commonly use weights to indicate a thickness, the weight of the stock doesn't necessarily correlate to thickness, even within the same category.

One of the questions we get quite often goes something like, "Why is this 80 lb. uncoated cover so much thicker than the 80 lb. coated cover?" This is the inherent problem with specifying a weight when what you really care about is thickness. In this particular instance, the coating on the paper actually adds a lot of weight to the sheet. In order to get 500 sheets of the coated stock to weigh the same as 500 sheets of the uncoated stock, the paper needs to be much thinner.

If what you really care about is the thickness of the paper, a better approach is to specify a thickness, or "point" size (often referred to as the "caliper" when shopping for paper). This is a measurement of how thick the sheet is in thousandths of an inch. So one sheet of a 10 pt. stock measures .01 inches, regardless of it's basis weight. A 10 pt. stock generally equates to a 100 lb. coated cover, and an 80 lb. uncoated cover. For text weight stocks, the difference between coated and uncoated thickness by basis weight are even greater. A 60 lb. offset sheet is roughly equivalent to a 100 lb. coated text sheet; both around 4.7-4.8 pt.

It's important to have an understanding of the basics when you buy printing so you have a general sense of what you're asking for and what you're going to get. If it's a brand-critical piece (rather than a cheap instruction set you're including with your product), it's even more important to sit down with your commercial printer and discuss what you want so they can provide you with a range of options to meet your needs and your budget. If they can't do that, then it's time to find a new printer!

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3249/Our-New-Digital-Press-Has-Arrived Our New Digital Press Has Arrived! Searles Graphics has provided digital printing services for nearly a decade. Recently we've made the decision to upgrade our digital printing infrastructure to the latest technology available from our chosen vendor, Xerox, with the installation of a brand new Versant 80 digital press. This new press is already up and running in our shop and waiting for your next short-run print job!

Our goal has always been to provide the latest in technology to our clients and this is a testament to that commitment. With this new press we can continue to offer short-run options for all of our clients, with in-line finishing capabilities that provide a multitude of options for your finished piece.

If you've not yet utilized Searles Graphics' digital printing options, click here to see how we can help. If you're not sure if digital printing is right for you, start with this article. And if you're familiar with digital printing but just haven't found a way to utilize it effectively for your business, read about our variable data printing capabilities.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3248/Trees-Dont-Need-Saving-Print-That-Email-as-Much-as-You-Want Trees Don't Need Saving, Print That Email as Much as You Want I've been wanting to write this article for some time now and a conversation I had over the weekend gave me just the push I needed. You've seen it before, that annoying, useless, holier-than-thou end to someone's email signature, "Please consider the environment before printing this email." Sometimes maybe you've seen it as, "Save trees. Please print this email only if necessary." I've even seen people chastised for using paper bags in delis and grocery stores by someone who decided they needed to help save trees. Well, guess what, the trees don't need your help.

That's right, if you're one of those on the "save the trees" kick, I have news for you. The trees don't need you to save them, I promise. At least not from the timber industry (which is where your paper comes from). While global deforestation is still an issue, the timber-products industry, especially in the United States, Canada, and Europe (among other responsible countries), is not only not a contributor to deforestation, but is actually one of the most beneficial contributors to the growing forests we have.

I understand how this trend started. We've grown up with stories and videos of rainforests being destroyed and clear-cut to support our growing population. We see areas in our neighborhoods that were once covered in trees cleared to make way for strip malls and housing developments. The problem with this view of the timber industry is that it's just not accurate in most of the world, particularly in the United States.

As a printing company, we're particularly sensitive to this topic. There seems to be this idea that not printing means you're "going green." But that couldn't be further from the truth.

Trees are a renewable natural resource. They are farmed, they are recyclable, and they are biodegradable. They're also not in danger from the timber industry and the products you buy at the store, like paper, cardboard boxes, and lumber. In fact, total forest growth in the United States has exceeded the amount harvested each year since the 1940s, meaning we actually have more forest land now than we did 70 years ago. Look closely at the paper you buy and you'll also notice a small logo on it that says it's FSC certified, meaning it's guaranteed to be responsibly sourced from land that is used for timber farming. These lands are harvested, re-planted, grown, and re-harvested the same as any other renewable, farmed resource. This includes imported paper regardless of where it comes from (and we import a lot of paper) - as long as you see that seal.

Not only are trees farmed, but the continued use of wood products is actually beneficial to the environment when sourced responsibly. We all know trees use sunlight and carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, producing oxygen as a byproduct. What's important to remember is the carbon atom needs to go somewhere, and ends up being stored within (as) the tree itself. When the tree biodegrades or is burned, the carbon atom is released back into the atmosphere after bonding with two more oxygen atoms once again as carbon dioxide. This means that as long as the chemical structure of the wood remains in-tact in products like paper and lumber, the carbon is stored indefinitely (a carbon sink). So while another tree grows in its place to suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the previous tree remains as a (semi) permanent carbon store.

In paper, this is only possible with recycling, as the paper you throw in the garbage breaks down quite quickly in landfills, releasing that carbon back into the atmosphere. This means that recycling programs are also an extremely important part of the process, where the paper continues to function as a carbon sink as long as it's being used in recycled products like more paper for your printer or cardboard.

It's also important to remember that more than 58% of the current land used for timber farming is privately owned. This means that if the demand for timber falls to the point where it's no longer a profitable enterprise for those private land owners, that land will be repurposed for other, more profitable uses. Meaning that sustaining demand for timber resources is critical to ensuring we maintain our timber forests.

Then there's the whole concept that going digital is somehow "green." Yes, Searles Graphics is a printing company, but it's also a digital marketing and web design and development company, so while this post may seem somewhat self-serving, here's the other side.

Electronic waste is one of the most harmful pollutants in the world right now, and the United States is the single largest global contributor. Electronic waste contains extremely toxic substances like mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, beryllium and brominated flame retardants. Up to 90% of the world's electronic waste is illegally traded or dumped each year according to the UN Environment Programme, and in the US, the majority of our electronic waste goes straight into our landfills, leaving all of those toxins to leach directly into the ground.

On the other hand, 96% of Americans currently have access to community curbside and/or drop-off paper recycling programs, and paper recovery for recycling has exceeded 63% each year since 2011 in the United States.

And the individual choices you make do matter. Every time you use email instead of print, that email needs to live somewhere; namely two separate data centers - in your outbox and the recipient's inbox - after traveling through a number of others on the journey from one to the other. Each of those datacenters turns over hardware on a regular basis, has increasing demands for storage and compute capacity, and uses a tremendous amount of power to not only keep those servers on, but to light and cool the facilities in which they reside. In fact, approximately half of the energy used by datacenters traditionally is attributed to the AC bill. That energy comes mostly from non-renewable resources that emit a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases and actually serve as our best carbon sinks when left untouched.

Still not sure? Here's an interesting take about how adding that "Please consider the environment" disclaimer actually harms the environment.

All this being said, the paper and timber industries do have negative effects on the environment when it comes to processing these resources, the same as any other industry. Power and energy are always required, to perform work, and that power needs to come from somewhere. However, while electronic waste continues to become a larger environmental issue every day, timber industries are constantly striving to becoming more and more efficient to limit those effects, while at the same time more trees continue to be planted and grow than we're harvesting. And while I'm certainly not advocating that you waste paper for the sake of wasting paper - being wasteful is still being wasteful - this idea that printing is somehow awful for our environment while ignoring the far more detrimental effects electronic waste has is just ill-informed and ignorant.

Oh yeah, and make sure you share this article with everyone you know to get them up to speed too!

Photo: Flickr | Sam Beebe

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3204/Anybody-that-Tells-You-Print-Is-Dead-Is-Lying-to-You Anybody that Tells You Print Is Dead Is Lying to You "Print is dead." It's a message we are bombarded with constantly, but is it true?

Nope. In fact, there may never have been a bigger opportunity in print marketing than there is right now. Why, you ask? How much mail do you get today versus 20 years ago? My bet is significantly less. How excited are you when you get something in the mail because of it? My bet is far more excited than when you get an email.

I'm sure most people remember the old days of direct mail marketing. You go through your mail every day and sort out the massive piles of junk mail, put all the bills in a pile, and maybe there's something leftover that's not one of those two, but probably not. Later that day, you'd login to America Online (they weren't AOL yet), and get super excited as you waited to hear those three magic words; "You've got mail!"

My how times have changed. Email has become such a huge, almost mundane, part of our lives that there's no excitement over getting a new email anymore. It's just a given that they're going to funnel in all day long. On the other hand, when we reach into the mailbox and pull out a magazine we subscribed to, or a letter, or even a catalog from a company we like shopping with, there's an excitement attached to it that was missing for a long time.

The smartest marketers of the mid-to-late-'90s jumped on email as a marketing opportunity as quickly as they could to capitalize on that excitement factor. That's how fast you should be jumping on the print bandwagon right now.

I'm not saying email marketing is dead - far from it. We're actually investing heavily in email as a primary channel and encouraging our clients to do the same. Nor am I saying that you should time-warp back to 1990 and resurrect the same marketing strategies you were using back then. What I am saying is that there are huge opportunities for the right kind of print marketing that will get your targets excited about hearing from you.

Don't believe me? Look at the image attached to this article. That was a variable data print mail piece sent to me by Google. Yes, that Google. And better yet, what were they trying to sell me? Digital advertising! One of the largest and most recognized tech companies in the world spends money on direct mail print advertising to drive revenue to their digital advertising services.

Need more examples? Red Bull, one of the most progressive media companies on the planet (yes, I said media company, not energy drink company) publishes a highly targeted print magazine, The Red Bulletin. This publication distributes 2.3 million copies globally, half of whom are under the age of 34. Content Marketing Institute, a business dedicated to serving marketers that deliver original, high-quality content to their audience, also sees the value in print marketing. Not only do they preach print marketing to their audience of over 150,000 email subscribers, but they practice it as well with their CCO (Chief Content Officer) Magazine, a subscription-based printed magazine.

So what is the right kind of print marketing for you? The answer is different for everybody and depends on a lot of factors. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or via email and I would be happy to take a quick look at what you're doing, or contact us at Searles Graphics if you want a more in-depth analysis of how you can make print work for your business. Either way, it's time to seriously think about making print a primary medium for your marketing or content strategy.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3182/Leveraging-Variable-Data-Printing-in-Your-Print-Marketing Leveraging Variable Data Printing in Your Print Marketing Variable data printing is the place where the digital world meets the real world in an explosion of marketing genius ... if you do it right.

So what exactly is variable data printing? Digital printing brings a number of different capabilities that traditional offset printing lacks. Offset is a mass-production process. The more you print, the cheaper each impression is. On the other hand, in digital printing the costs are more fixed on unit-cost basis. While you'll see some savings on larger runs, the savings aren't nearly as high as they are with offset printing.

However, as a mass-production process, offset printing falls short in customization. Digital printing, and more specifically, variable data printing, gives us the ability to change each piece on the fly and customize it based on who the recipient of that particular piece is.

My favorite example of how this can be used to a marketers advantage uses a fictional real estate firm. Lets imagine you own a real estate company that has a database of prospective buyers. For each buyer you have a few key pieces of information: Age, marital status, and whether or not they have children. Your firm is pretty large so your database contains a few thousand names. For you to go through each prospect and individually market to them would be prohibitively time consuming. This is where variable data fits the bill.

In our example, we're going to break age into three groups: Under 35, 35-55, and 55+. This gives us a total of 12 possible combinations. In reality, we can probably simplify this further by doing things like combining the under 55 with children group and the under 35 with children groups, and assuming that 55+ with children are likely to have those children not living with them anymore to treat that group the same as the 55+ without children. For arguments' sake, let's say we have 8 total combinations.

What this means is that we can design eight targeted marketing pieces for our database of 3,000 names and be reasonably confident that the recipient is going to receive something completely relevant to their situation. Our unmarried-under-35-with-no-children group is going to see the one-bedroom apartment on main street that's walking distance from all the local bars and restaurants. Our 55+ group is going to see the condo in the retirement community, and our 35-55 with kids group is going to see the 3-bedroom ranch on a half acre with the swingset that's next to the park in the great school district.

Now obviously in the real world we'd also add income into this equation but you get the idea. With minimal investment in graphic design we've come up with a highly targeted direct mail piece that comes off the press already addressed to the recipient. This is just one simple example of the power of variable data marketing.

Where most people fall short in variable data marketing is in the data. Your data has to be rock solid to execute this strategy at a high level and most small businesses aren't willing to invest the time and effort required to gather and store that much data, and to continue to keep it as accurate as possible.

It's essential that you leverage your digital assets like your website and/or your CRM system to capture and maintain accurate data. It's also key that your employees understand how important accurate data is to your business and it's objectives so they assign as much value to entering and scrubbing data as you need them to. Once you have a solid data strategy in place you can send your marketing into hyperdrive and you'll be amazed at the results you can drive without changing your marketing and advertising spend.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3170/Image-Size-and-Resolution-for-Print Image Size and Resolution for Print An issue we quite commonly face is the inability to use images and photos provided by clients for print jobs due the issue that the resolution or size of the image is insufficient for print. Much of the population believes that if an image looks good on screen, it will print just as well. This is not true. Image resolution for on-screen viewing is drastically different than print. Sometimes clients are under the impression that they can provide an image downloaded from their website for a print project and it will look just as good in print as it does on their screen. You may have witnessed the result of this, printing low resolution images. The appearance is bitmapped, blocky, blurry... printing image files that are too small and too low a resolution for print, not the best quality at all.

These are two of the most common issues that determine the best quality of an image for print, image dimensions and resolution. Our general rule of thumb is 300 dpi (dots per inch) at actual print size. There are more technical explanations about the relationships between file size, resolution, and image dimensions, but for the purposes of this article, we’d like to keep it simple.

The best way to check if an image is the proper resolution is to use an image size calculator. You can find several of these online. First determine the files pixel dimensions. On a PC right click on the image file and go to properties>details. On a Mac select the image file and hit control “I” (info). These pixel dimensions can be punched into the image size calculator and, if you select the 300 dpi option, the maximum size (in inches) that the image can be used for print will show in result.

Other issues that determine best print quality are image sharpness (focus), color, composition, exposure... These are somewhat photography related issues but they do effect image quality. There is a great deal a designer can do in Photoshop to correct or enhance a photo, but it is always better to have a better quality start point.

With a digital camera, the quality or file size setting for photos should be as high as possible. This will ensure that there is sufficient resolution for print. The highest quality or file size setting ensures that the most information related to the photograph is captured, thus resulting in the best quality for print. These files can always be reduced in size for online viewing or email transmission by removing file information through compression; but you cannot add information back into a low resolution file. These larger file sizes will eat up memory on your card but will result in the best quality images for print.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3168/Using-the-Pantone-Color-Matching-System-(PMS) Using the Pantone Color Matching System (PMS) Many of our clients are not aware of the differences  between printing processes. Although much of our printing projects, both digital & offset, are completed in four color process rather than spot PMS colors, we would like to explain the process of printing with the Pantone Color Matching System.

A typical type of job that would require PMS ink colors would be stationery such as letterheads, envelopes, and business cards. Using consistent ink colors for a logo or corporate branding purposes is a necessity. This will strengthen your identity, and the right combination of color can make your company stand out. These standard PMS colors, selected for your company stationary, will be referenced across other industries to reinforce your branding. Vehicle wrap, uniform, signage, and  many other promotional item companies understand the PMS color matching system and require your PMS color choices to ensure the best possible color matching

Commercial print shops rely on a color ink standard known as the Pantone Color Matching System otherwise know as the PMS color guide. This, regularly updated library of standard ink colors offers a wide spectrum of color. Pantone releases new swatch books on a regular basis that represent the ink color on both coated and uncoated stocks. These swatch books provide the pressman with the ink mix ratio to achieve each specific ink color.

It is important that clients understand that this is the print industry standard for color matching. This standard is used to ensure accurate  and consistent color for print.

Clients sometime bring samples of color for us to match. Whether it is a photograph representing company vehicle color, or the color of their uniform, we find the best and closest match in the PMS book and mix the ink custom.

Quite often we are asked to match a color referenced by an image on a cell phone, tablet, or computer monitor. We will again, use our best judgment to match the color based on the device we are viewing the color on. But, keep in mind... every device and monitor will display color differently. There are many variables to consider with viewing color on a screen including resolution, view angle, and different color lookup tables. Once a decision has been made with regards to  a selected PMS color, the variations between viewing devices will at least be consistent.

Proofing these colors can be done two ways. Our standard proof is done on our Epson wide format printer. This proofing system emulates the ink color on a standard white coated stock. PMS, as well as CMYK process inks will appear differently on different stocks. The PMS book has covered the two most basic stock options, coated and uncoated samples are given for every ink color offered. But, color stocks, such as cream, ivory, natural... all will change the color of the ink's appearance.

The most accurate way to see the results of PMS inks on these stock colors is to run a press proof. This proofing option will cost almost as much as printing the actual job, because it essentially requires the same process as a typical print project. We digitally prepare and rip a file, output plates, mix ink, hang plates, and run on press. This type of proof is reserved for color-critical jobs... print projects where color branding and matching is essential, down to the last detail.

So as explained here, selecting PMS colors for your company is an important first step to consistency in brand and identity marketing efforts. Take the time to sit with a designer and carefully select the colors that would best represent your company. Hopefully, understanding this process better will make your color selection process easier and much smoother for your designer.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/3156/What-is-digital-printing What is digital printing? Digital printing is a relative newcomer to the commercial printing scene. At Searles Graphics, we put our first digital press in about 7 years ago, and we're actually in the process of purchasing another one right now.

A digital press is basically a larger, higher-quality, more complicated version of the printer you have in your office. They use toner just like your printer, and they can print files straight from your computer. So why would you go to a commercial printer instead of just printing the same job on your own printer in your office?

Simple: Price and performance. From a price standpoint, it's an economies of scale issue. We buy A LOT more paper and A LOT more toner than you do at your home or business. Because of that we get much better pricing on those items than you do from your supplier.

This is an important distinction. I've had a number of customers tell me they were going to just print something on their own printer after getting a quote, only to show them the math on what they pay for those items and watch as they are taken aback by what their raw costs are. Toner and printer paper are accepted and expected office expenses, so another couple reams of paper and some extra toner doesn't get noticed at a high-level. But when you break it down to see what it really costs you to operate for larger print jobs, it's quite a big expense.

Performance-wise, there are huge improvements in just about every category when it comes to digital presses vs a standard office printer. First, the overall print quality is far superior to what you'd get from your office printer, especially when you have a lot of coverage on the sheet or colors that need to be matched as close as possible. These machines are made for commercial print shops and were designed and built to compete with offset presses, so quality was a huge factor for companies like Xerox and Canon to be able to enter that market.

Speed is another factor; where your office printer can typically run about 20-30 pages-per-minute (ppm), even an entry-level digital press can run 70-80 ppm.

Our digital press even allows us to do some finishing inline when it would be cost-prohibitive for us to bring your print job into our bindery for finishing. Our digital press gives us the ability to saddle-stitch inline, and other options like perfect binding are standard modules for digital presses that aren't available on your office printer.

So what does this all really mean? In general, digital printing provides faster turnaround times and lower costs for smaller volume jobs. Where running 200 flyers would be very expensive on an offset press, it's quite economical to run that job on a digital press. With the built-in finishing options, producing something like 200 68-page 4-color books is an option that won't break the bank anymore. The finished product comes right off the press and goes straight into a box, rather than moving from printing press to folder to saddle-stitcher. The former requires a digital press and an operator; the latter requires a press and a pressman, a folder and a folder-operator, and a saddle-stitcher and 2 operators - great for high volume work, but overkill for small jobs.

Digital printing has one other huge advantage over offset printing: Variable data. I'll go into variable data printing in a lot more detail in the future, but the gist is that it allows you to customize each printed piece to the recipient, providing massive amounts of value to smart and creative marketers.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/2161/Printing-The-Non-Traditional-Media Printing: The Non-Traditional Media Just about everybody these days uses some form of digital marketing. Whether it's email marketing, Google AdWords, social media marketing, your company website, SEO, native mobile apps, or any of the countless other ways to market yourself digitally, it's being done. But how many of you are still using print as a way to really connect with your audience?

I recently read Joe Pulizzi's 2013 book Epic Content Marketing in which he tells the story of a client that came to him wanting to utilize print media because he was looking for "non-traditional media" opportunities. Yes, that's right, he wanted to utilize print as non-traditional media. Pulizzi even adds, "I’m here to tell you that there has never been a bigger opportunity for brands in the printed channel than right now." (You can read an article written by Joe discussing the opportunity print represents here. Please do, it's worth the read.)

When you think about it, it makes sense. The digital shift has happened. Brands and businesses are no longer worried about the value or ROI of digital media as a whole; it's now a given that you can't not have a high-level of digital brand visibility. And rightly so, digital media and digital marketing are extremely valuable tools. I myself am a software engineer and a marketer that convinces clients to utilize the right digital tools every day; but I'm also a printer at heart with a strong belief in the value of printed media.

Our core business philosophy has always been to stay ahead of the technology curve to provide the most amount of value to our customers that we possibly can. Recently, that has meant shifting a lot of our energy and resources into digital mediums and offering services like web design, digital marketing, content marketing, social media management, email marketing, and more. But we still have our roots firmly planted in print because it works. And we're staying put because it works, not just because we're clinging to an idea of the past and are too afraid to move forward.

Just last week we undertook a direct mail campaign for one of our products that produced better results in a shorter period of time than any of our digital efforts in that area. We're also undertaking a large investment and expansion in our own print marketing efforts that will be coming in January of 2016 as a way to capitalize on the lack of print material being produced these days.

The best business owners are contrarians. Nobody ever changed an industry or experienced record growth by doing what everybody else was doing. So the fact that everybody has now gone digital should raise an eyebrow about the opportunity that print represents.

To be clear, I'm not advocating you return to the same things you were doing in print 20 years ago, and I'm certainly not telling you to halt your digital marketing efforts. Rather, it's time to take your digital efforts and use them to help improve your print. Build better mailing lists, get better data about your customers, and customize your print to perform at a level that wasn't possible 20 years ago.

I'll be following this up with more specific recommendations about how you can use print to stand out from the competition so be sure to subscribe for updates!

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/2152/What-is-perfect-binding What is perfect binding? Perfect binding is one of the most common binding options available to you when you're designing your print piece (saddle stitching is another extremely common option for commercial printing). If you're not familiar with the term, perfect binding is the squared-off, flat spine you most often see on soft-cover books and larger magazines.

Where a saddle stitch binds the piece together using staples, perfect binding uses glue to adhere the cover to the spine. The spine of the book is first purposely cut to a rough edge to better accept the glue. The cover is then applied flat and folded around the edges of the book or magazine. In the video below, the sound you hear is the knife grinding the spine and the foreground is the cover feeder pressing the cover onto the interior of the book.

Perfect binding gives a nice high-end look to your finished piece but it does have its limitations. There are varying grades of quality in perfect binding. A higher quality perfect bind, like those used in book publishing, will be more expensive but will last longer and hold up against a significant amount of use. The lower quality the perfect bind, the more likely the bind will fail and pages will begin to fall out as the book is opened and closed continually.

There are good applications for both ends of the quality spectrum in perfect binding. For items like soft-cover books, a high-quality perfect bind is needed because the book is generally thick, expensive for the consumer, and expected to hold up to a significant amount of use. Lower quality perfect binding is a great option for printed pieces that have a short shelf-life. Weekly or monthly magazines, monthly or quarterly catalogs, trade show materials, and quarterly and yearly reports are all prime candidates for a binding solution that won't break the bank and doesn't need to hold up to a tremendous amount of use.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/2133/What-is-4-color-printing What is 4 color printing? To sophisticated print buyers, the terminology is second-nature; "48 pages + cover, 4/4, dull spot varnish, 100# coated cover, 70# opaque text, saddle-stitch ... " etc. But to new buyers, the print buying process can be tricky. I've already covered some other basics like how the offset printing process works and why price-per-piece is so heavily tied to your quantity, but after a few recent potential clients called and didn't understand what I meant when I said "four color process" I thought it would be a good time to touch on exactly what this means.

At it's most basic definition, four color printing is full color printing. The same way you used to combine yellow and blue to make green in art class, we use four different colors in different ratios to deliver (almost) any color you want to see.

You'll often hear 4 color printing referred to as "CMYK." This is a reference to the four colors that are used in the process. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. From those four colors, we can deliver almost any color in the rainbow. I say almost because the four color process can't deliver things like metallics or even the color (or lack thereof I guess) white. The only way we can create white is to apply nothing to a white sheet. Otherwise, if you need a spot white (or a metallic or some other specialty color) then it needs to be applied by another unit on the press after the four color process. This is why we have a five color press here at Searles, and there are some presses (especially label presses) that can go into double digits on how many colors can be applied.

Most likely, you've already seen this process in action in some way, shape, or form. The most basic example is the grade-school art class color mixing I mentioned earlier. To be fair, we still do that too. When we need to match a PMS color we often need to mix specific quanitites of different color inks to do so, but that's a topic for another day.

If you've ever used a program like Photoshop or done any kind of web development, you should be quite familiar with color separations whether you realize it or not. Digital colors work similarly to print process, however they work with a different color wheel. By default, these applications use the RGB (red, green, blue) color system to get you to the final color you choose with your eye-dropper. (That six digit number you're provided is a hexidecimal representation of each the amount of each that goes into making the final color, but that's a little beyond the scope of this article.) If you're working on art for print, you need to convert your project to CMYK so the colors can be properly separated and burned to plates for print.

When you go to place your first order for print, remember that four color is just the proper way to indicate you want full color, but remember the limitations it brings and understand if and when you may need to use a fifth color (or more). Also remember that adding those requirements becomes expensive, as 6 and 7 color presses and printers are far less common than 4 and 5 color presses. If you'd like to see the process in action, feel free to contact me to come down and take a tour!

Photo: Flickr | Ann Wuyts

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/1120/How-Stuff-Works-Offset-Printing-Press How Stuff Works: Offset Printing Press Because I grew up around printing presses and in a printing company, sometimes I take for granted how cool the print process actually is. I forget what an interesting place printing companies can be to work in until I tour a client or prospective customer around our building to show them what we do.

One of the things I like to explain is how the print process actually works as most people have no idea how a printing press gets the job done. Specifically, how offset printing works.

The principle of offset printing is the basic tenet that oil and water don't mix. My dad was famous for his school demonstrations on career day(s) where he would load up an ink knife and lick it in front of the class to show the ink wouldn't transfer onto his tongue.

(As a side note, we had an employee who tried doing that one time when a group of students came to tour the building and he got a little too aggressive with the pressure ... it didn't end well.)

The print process starts with good design. A good graphic designer that really knows the print process can do a lot to help you save money and make sure your print project runs well on press and through the bindery.

Next, the print design is sent to pre-press where it is prepared for the press. Because design is done in single pages or layouts, pre-press is where the entire job is considered and laid out into press sheets that can be combined in bindery to produce your final piece (more on this in another post).

The final step in pre-press is to burn plates. The print process I grew up with required large cameras and plate burners to produce negatives, strip those negatives into press sheet layouts, and then burn the negatives onto a plate.

A fresh plate before processing

These days all of that is computerized and we utilize high-quality print-ready PDF's to lay the job out, separate colors, and rip it into files the imagesetter can understand and translate to a plate.

A simplified explanation of a plate is simply that it's an aluminum sheet with two special characteristics. The imagesetter exposes the image area of the plate to light which "burns" the image into the plate using a compound that repels water and is receptive to oil, while the rest of the plate is receptive to water.

Imagesetter at Searles Graphics

The plates are then put on the press where the plate first contacts a roller that coats the non-image area with water, followed by a roller that coats the remainder of the plate (the image area) with ink (remeber the whole ink and water don't mix thing?).

Because the plate is also saturated with water, it wouldn't do much good to put that in contact with a sheet of paper, so the plate is run against a blanket cylinder where the image is transferred - or "offset" - onto the blanket. This is what ultimately transfers the ink onto the paper and is how offset printing gets its name.

Hopefully I didn't bore you too much and feel free to stop by or contact us if you'd like to take a tour or lick an ink knife sometime (we may not actually let you lick an ink knife)!

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/138/What-is-saddle-stitch-binding What is saddle stitch binding? When we deal with customers that are new to the print buying process, sometimes the terminology that we're so accustomed to isn't as commonplace in their vocabulary. Saddle stitching is one of the binding options we recommend the most, it's cost effective and holds up well against a fair amount of use.

So what is saddle stitch binding? In plain English, saddle stitching is when we staple a book together on the spine. It's called "saddle" stitching because the process involves resting the book, magazine, or other printed piece (for example, we have saddle-stitched inserts into pocket folders for a really high-end presentation folder) on either side of a central conveyor (saddle) and stapling through the spine.

One of the reasons this is such a cost effective option is that the saddle stitcher does all of the work of collating the book, stitching it together, and trimming the edges to produce a completely finished piece from it's folded parts. There are also no minimums when dealing with saddle stitching like their would be with other options like perfect binding.

The life of a saddle stitch will then depend on how much use the book, magazine, etc. gets on a regular basis before it's reached it's useful life, and the weight of the paper used for the piece. A lighter stock will tear more easily away from the staple than a heavier stock.

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http://www.searlesgraphics.com/blog/129/Why-does-my-price-per-piece-change-when-my-quantity-changes Why does my price-per-piece change when my quantity changes? I think the misconception with "price-per-piece" stems from the fact that everything we quote when it comes to print materials is a very custom process. We work with you to pick the right stock, the best format so it stands out or runs better on press or in the bindery, something that's more cost-effective or something that might be more costly represents the high quality your brand stands for.

In contrast, people are generally more used to unit prices. I want 3 of these and each one costs $x so my total is $3x. If I decide I only need two than my total is $2x. It's simple that way, and most people don't buy things on a regular basis at quantities that justify a change to that model.

But commercial printing is a volume-based business. Even if we do extremely short runs (which we can do on our digital press), they tend to be of larger items - like a 64-page coil-bound book - that still justify the cost of coming to a commercial printer to get it done.

The short answer to the question "Why does my price-per-piece change my unit cost when I change my quantity?" is economies of scale. It's always less expensive on a per-item basis to produce things in larger quantities. It doesn't matter if what you're producing is a widget or a brochure, more always means a lower price.

The reason for this is simple: Overhead. In the print industry, most of the overhead comes from make-ready (aside from the obvious costs of rent, power, heat, etc.). Make-ready is the time it takes to set up a printing press, a folder, a saddle-stitcher, a perfect binder, or any other piece of equipment to run your job. Regardless of the length of the run (i.e. number of pieces) it takes the same amount of time to prep a piece of equipment.

Whether it's washing up the press before your job runs, making sure the ink coverage is correct across the page, setting up a folder to fold the press sheet at exactly the right spot, or simply loading and unloading large quantities of paper, there is a lot of time that goes into preparing to run a job. Once the printing press, folder, collator or any other equipment we use is set up, running the job is a relatively straightforward process.

As an example (the numbers aren't accurate but you'll get the point), let's say it takes 30 minutes to prepare a printing press to run your job and we can run that press at 10,000 sheets an hour. If you only do 1,000 pieces, a very large portion of your cost is in your make-ready because it will take longer to do that than it will to run the entire job! However, if you're doing 100,000 pieces, make-ready becomes a much smaller percentage of the overall cost of the job. If you imagine that a make-ready costs you $100 on each piece of equipment (the real number is based on a number of factors that we don't have time to go into in this article!), then for 1,000 pieces to go from a press, to a folder, to a saddle-stitcher means your make ready adds $0.30 per piece (3 * 100 / 1000). For 100,000 pieces that cost is only $0.003 per piece.

In this example, if we priced solely based on a per-piece model, and we decided we need to charge $0.30 per piece, that would add $30,000 to that 100,000 piece run, instead of the $300 it really costs.

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