Things To Say To A Printer: 'I'm going to design our brochure' 😟

Saying such a thing creates mixed feelings in me.
Firstly, the happy glow as someone joins the design club. With all the exciting Apps and potential for creativity.
Secondly, a slight tinge of regret because they didn't ask to use our design services. Well, I guess, free is always better?
Thirdly, a sense of dread. Have you no idea how difficult this actually is? Once upon a time the standard of desktop publishing was pretty basic.

Then again, it was quite an involved process turning the design into print.
Even twenty years ago the print would be photographed and turned into a printing plate. This technology was only being superseded as we took over Minuteman Press Stockport.
Things moved on and now we have full colour printing with amazing touched up graphics with layers of reality, individualised printing, holographics, watermarks, smelly print and a wide range of materials to print on. Currently designs are sent direct to the printing press with minimal human intervention.

In fact, we are now finding human intervention a problem. Staff find automated systems don't do what they want and unpredictable things can happen. For example a couple of weeks ago: the artificial intelligence misread the art work and expanded it to fill the page. In another case, the wrong file was printed because the project had bypassed the usual automated channels.

 

The latest polymer notes are a wonder of modern printing technology.

If you are planning your own project. Best start with some decent software. The online App Canva is now quite popular but is an American system. Americans sometimes seem oblivious to the rest of the world using metric measurements. Business card sizes might finish up the wrong size.

Our favourite App is currently the Affinity suite. Often not quite up there with the sophistication of the Adobe suite but massively cheaper to buy.

Sometimes, one might be tempted to a design using on line system. Only last week, a customer showed us a business card produced at a well known online printers and the names were cropped off. We can't guarantee to get things right either but we would automatically reprint a job that we had allowed that to happen.

Last week we printed a voucher for B&Q and part of the Ts&Cs were cropped at the bottom on some of the vouchers. Thankfully we didn't need to reprint them all.

Whatever, best speak to The Printer before starting a project. Minuteman Press Stockport would be relieved (it saves grief down the line) to offer free advice. Or even, for a reasonable fee, do it for you.