Summary: Here are five things that should be of concern to you when you are looking out for a print company.
From the time Gutenberg invented the first printing machine, there are so many changes that occurred to printing machines. Printing machines did evolve greatly, and they are helping us to get print material much faster with better quality and fewer errors. So many companies are offering print services today than ever before. But, this has created a lot of confusion than good.
I have been absolutely intrigued by the art of advertising for the better part of my life, perhaps because it usually blends visual art, writing, humor, psychology, and storytelling.
First of all, I want to draw a (minor) distinction between advertising and marketing. I consider advertising to be more targeted, directly selling a specific product or service rather than just nurturing a favorable image of a company (public relations) or increasing public awareness of a company (marketing). But really, they’re all the same in that the purpose is to make people aware of what you’re offering (either a service or a product) and to convince them to buy something.
What do you do if you’re faced with a new kind of commercial printing you’ve never seen before? Or at least maybe you’ve seen it but certainly not specified or bought printing for such a project.
This happened to me just this week, and I’ve been in the field for 44 years. When a client approached me with a request for a vinyl binder that will hold 32 stained wood samples, I had to decide how to proceed. I thought this challenge might be of interest to you since for everyone, at some point, everything is new. The big question is how you will apply your prior experience to make sense of the new job and find vendors who can manufacture it.
When I first started designing publications forty years ago, I had no formal training. I made a lot of errors. Or, worse, I produced a lot of mediocre work.
In part this was because I had started in publications as a word person. I wrote and edited, but did not yet think in terms of how to design a page for a print book, a brochure, or an advertisement in such a way as to grab the interest of the reader. I could, however, recognize good design.
I think most people would agree that in the realm of custom printing, envelopes are decidedly not sexy. That said, I’d actually like to disagree.
I recently came upon an old handbook on printing paper from the 1980s, which in fact includes a wealth of information that is just as pertinent now as it was when I started my career in commercial printing. It’s called Walden’s Handbook for Salespeople and Buyers of Printing Paper (published by the Walden-Mott Corporation). If you ask your printer or paper supplier, I’m sure you can get a comparable (but current) text. What makes this such a good print book is that it focuses only on paper and related subjects, unlike most textbooks on graphic design and printing that don’t have this depth in this one subject.
I’ve been “refreshing” the corporate identity of a client of mine for whom I have been brokering commercial printing. In developing a new logo and new business card, letterhead, etc., I have been reminded of all the issues that arise in logo development and implementation: the issues I have mentioned a number of times in the PIE Blog articles.