About four years ago my fiancee and I had a house fire. In the ensuing months we went to all manner of cabinet stores, tile stores, and flooring stores (in addition to CraigsList vendors) to collect materials for rebuilding the house. Needless to say, I saw more than my share of floor and wall coverings that had been digitally decorated. It was intriguing since I had grown up with real wood and real stone, but I filed it away in my memory.
I recently wrote a PIE Blog article about a client who needed hang-tags for her client’s restaurant.
Recap of the Job Specs and Intended Usage
More specifically, the job specs involve a 10,000-copy press run on 65# or 80# white smooth uncoated cover paper, die cut with diagonal edges and and a drill hole (like the proverbial furniture hang-tag), printed in one PMS color with no bleeds. The trim size is 5 3/16" x 2 11/16".
When the driveway paving person came up to our house a few days ago to retrieve a coroplast sign he had inadvertently left behind, he said he was glad my fiancee and I hadn’t thrown it away. He said the signs had been expensive.
Being a custom printing broker, I said I might be able to get them for less than he had been paying. The words just came out. “One seller to another,” I said. “I’m a commercial printing salesperson.”
About 25 years ago, when I was an art director/production manager, the non-profit foundation for which I worked brought in a marketing consultant. Even though it was a quarter of a century ago, I still remember two things he said.
First he told a story of a campaign he had created for a foundation seeking funding to help the disabled. He had sent wheelchairs to select donors and had asked them to spend a day in the wheelchair and then donate what they thought appropriate. (Sort of a “walk a mile in my shoes” approach.)
A potential book printing client of mine is producing a 6” x 9”, 220-page, perfect-bound book. Over the last few weeks we have been discussing her project, and I have been providing prices. What’s intriguing to me is that she had been considering printing her book through an on-line, print-on-demand publisher, but after our discussions, she likes the personal attention of working with a custom printing broker and going to a “brick-and-mortar” printer. She had spoken to a number of friends, and some had not been altogether satisfied with the overall quality of their print-on-demand books.
I read a few articles online this week about custom printing on glass. My interest piqued, I did further research. What interested me the most were the facts that glass is non-porous and that printing on glass needs to be durable (after all, if an architect builds a structure and the printing on the glass panes degrades, it could be extremely expensive to repair or replace). So how can you print on glass in such a way that the image won't scratch off and degrade? This was my question.