Printing

The design and production work of of your desktop publishing project is nearly finished, and it's almost time to get it printed. So how do you know which printer to use? Is the local quickie print franchise the best place to get the job done? Or should you look elsewhere? Can the shop deal with your Windows files or do they only want to see Mac stuff?

One printer can't do it all. While there are many similarities in the processes involved, there are great differences in the equipment used. The shop that specializes in business card printing, for instance, is rarely the one you'll turn to for t-shirt printing. This is because business cards, like most commercial print jobs, are run with offset lithographic equipment (offset or litho, for short). Most t-shirt production printing, on the other hand, uses serigraphic (screen printing) equipment.

Your local quick print shop might be the best place to get the job done. Or it might be the worst ...

If you go to your local quick printing shop with a standard job that they can run on their presses, that's cool. Standard jobs -- those based on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch page -- will fit on the widest variety of equipment. But if you design an odd-sized piece in Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress, say a 12 x 19 inch newsletter, you're likely to rule out a raft of smaller presses. You'll have to take a step up to a commercial printer that has larger format presses in-house.

Now this isn't to say that your designs should be limited by your existing vendor's equipment ... just that you should know the vendor's limitations. While you should know your vendor, just as importantly (make that even more importantly), your print vendor should know you. If you've spend weeks designing a piece that's too big for their presses, they shouldn't try to talk you into redesigning it to fit their limitations. They should be straight with you and say "hey, that won't fit our presses, but XYZ's shop is perfect for this project."

There are a couple of ways to do this (at least). Your regular printer can act as a print broker--you pay them and they pay the company that actually does the printing. Or they can simply refer you to the other firm. When you use a broker, you're likely to pay a bit more for the project, but you can gain a bit of insulation in the process. Hand off that project and it's the broker's responsibility to keep the ball moving.

The printing industry has a great history of family run businesses. When you get right down to it, printing is a highly service-oriented business that delivers a customized product. The best firms aren't run like drive-thru fast food joints. The families that take the care to meet their clients needs help those business to grow ... and they grow right along with it.

The relationship between the print account exec and the customer is all-important.

If your local family-owned quick printer has your best interests in mind, keep working with them. If not? Well, there's a great big world wide web full of printers that just might ...