Mary Ellen Johnson on digital printing, part 2

In part two of my interview with Mary Ellen Johnson, McCallum Print Group sales rep, she explains the nuts and bolts of digital printing equipment, ink, paper, and prepress, and reveals secrets to successful digital print jobs.

Please note that there are other digital presses in the marketplace, but some information here applies specifically to HP Indigo presses, since that’s the brand of digital equipment Mary Ellen works with.

DIGITAL INKS, PAPERS AND PRESSES

NP: What should we know about paper for digital presses?

MEJ:  Papers for Indigo presses have been given a special surface treatment at the paper mill. These treated stocks come in uncoated—including 100% post-consumer waste stocks. Gloss, matte or dull coated are also available.

Most printers have a preferred house stock. When you specify the house stock, you not only know it will run well, but you’ll  also enjoy a better price, since the printer won’t have to buy full cartons of paper for your project.

NP:  How are digital inks different from traditional offset?

MEJ:  Many digital presses are toner based, so the color sits on top of the paper rather than soaking in like it would in traditional offset printing. Other presses, like the HP Indigo, use a liquid ink that combines clear, clean, strong pigments with a polymer. The ink is applied with heat and pressure, but it still sits on top of the paper, and is more fragile than offset inks. Digital inks can look very vibrant.

NP:  What kinds of digital presses does McCallum Print Group have?

HP 7000 Indigo press

MEJ: McCallum has HP Indigo presses. Indigo presses were first developed in Israel, and then bought by the Hewlett-Packard Company a few years ago.

We have the 3000, 5000 and 7000 series HP presses. The 3000 and 5000 can print up to  12 x 18 inches including bleed. Our newest press, the 7000, has the advantage of a larger image area, 13 x 19 inches with bleed.

NP:  What are the most notable improvements in the latest generation of presses?

MEJ:  The newest Indigo presses are faster and can handle larger paper. Our new HP Indigo 7000 does the best job with large-area screen tints and big solids. The offline coater that came with the 7000 can apply gloss or dull UV coating to protect the ink or flatten the appearance of the printing.

ENSURING DIGITAL SUCCESS

NP: What can customers do to ensure that their digital print projects are successful?

MEJ:  Love your art before you send it to us. This means releasing clean files that are approved and correct. Have great color to start with—if an image looks muddy in your file, it will print muddy, too. And be sure to include any bleeds in your files. For best results, especially on type, builds should be built with at least three colors.

Select a printer with a strong prepress department that will help you determine the best color builds and troubleshoot your files before they go to press. McCallum has developed prepress techniques to help ensure color consistency, which is especially important for brand colors.

NP: When buying digital printing, what should you look for in a printer?

MEJ: Send your job to an experienced printer—a company that is knowledgeable about ink on paper and doesn’t treat their press like a fancy color copier!

Go to Part One of interview…

Disclaimer: The FCC will be happy to know that Nani Paape, author of the Printing Disasters blog, received no compensation in exchange for this interview.

Mary Ellen Johnson on digital printing, part 1

I will freely admit that I was not among the first to jump on the digital printing bandwagon. My early digital print projects suffered banding, pooling, uneven color, chipped edges, jaggy type knockouts, and a certain “toner-esque” shine to the color that really didn’t wow me. “Give me offset printing any day,” I gnashed!

But digital technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past five years, persuading even skeptics like me that quality products can indeed be printed on digital presses. In fact, digital printing is central to the future of the printing industry.

Knowing that others probably had many of the same questions about digital printing that I did, I recently asked my friend Mary Ellen Johnson all about digital printing.

Mary Ellen is a sales rep that has sold traditional offset printing for 20+ years. She took the crash course in digital printing when she accepted a position at Seattle’s McCallum Print Group a few years ago. Now she takes advantage of McCallum’s traditional offset and HP Indigo digital technologies to deliver the best-fitting print solutions for her customers.

In this three-part interview, Mary Ellen shares her knowledge about what digital printing does best.

DIGITAL ADVANTAGES, DISADVANTAGES, AND MISCONCEPTIONS

NP: Hello, Mary Ellen. Is there such a thing as the perfect digital print project?

MEJ:  Yes! A good candidate for digital printing is built in process colors (CMYK), with colors that reproduce well as four-color builds. The finished flat size needs to be 12 x 18 inches or smaller, and the ideal digital job requires 5,000 impressions or fewer.

Digital presses print both sides of the paper in one pass. So for example, 1,000 two-sided sales fliers would require 2,000 impressions, 1,000 for each side. Here’s another example: You can get four 6 x 9-inch sheets out of a 13 x 19-inch sheet (allowing for bleeds), so 5,000 impressions would yield 10,000 6 x 9-inch postcards very efficiently.

In general, the quantity “sweet spot” for digital printing is about 2,500 sheets. If you are printing more sheets than that, offset printing is more cost-effective.

NP What are the advantages of digital printing? Disadvantages?

MEJ:  The biggest advantages are less paper waste and a shorter production timeline. A digital press project might use 50 sheets of makeready, compared to 800 to 1,000 sheets of makeready for an offset job.

The biggest disadvantage is that you can’t really adjust color very much once you’re on press, so what you see in a press proof is what you’ll get in the print job.

What kinds of design features does digital printing handle especially well? Not so well?

MEJ:  Surprisingly, heavy solids like rich black and many four-color build floods look great. Big areas of light tints don’t work as well, as they can show banding. And it can be a challenge to match corporate colors exactly.

NP: Are there end uses for which digital printing would not be appropriate?

MEJ:  Letterhead is still not a good candidate for digital printing. When digitally printed pages are run through a laser printer, the high heat reheats the ink, and marking can result. Digital inks on dull coated stocks scratch easily, so these coated stocks can be coated after printing. At McCallum, we varnish with Indigo UV varnishing equipment.

NP: What are the most common mistaken impressions about digital printing?

MEJ:  People think digital presses are really fast machines. Actually, they run quite slowly, around 4,000 impressions an hour, compared to 10,000 or more on an offset press. People also think digital is cheaper, and it’s not. The per-piece printing price is higher on digital. On the other hand, set-up costs for a four-color offset print job might be $1,000, compared to $100 to set up a similar job on a digital press.

NP: What’s a realistic schedule for digital printing?

MEJ:  I recommend four to six days for digital, compared to five to seven days for offset printing. Approvals still take time, but PDF proofs can speed up the timeline further, if you are confident in your printer.

Parts two and three of my interview with Mary Ellen Johnson will appear in the Printing Disasters blog on November 23 and November 30 respectively. Check back to read more!

Disclaimer: The FCC will be happy to know that Nani Paape, author of the Printing Disasters blog, received no compensation in exchange for this interview.

Hello, I’m Litho; hello, I’m Indigo

To whet your appetite for my upcoming articles on digital printing, take a look at Hewlett-Packard’s take-off on Apple’s Hello I’m a Mac, Hello, I’m a PC ads… A fun way to think about variable data!

My favorite PaperSpecs.com features

After I interviewed Sabine Lenz, founder of PaperSpecs, she gave me a live tour of the web site, www.PaperSpecs.com. I was impressed by the breadth of features offered and how easy they are to use. I’d like to share a few of my favorite features with you.

Meet Sabine Lenz, PaperSpecs.com founder

Now that many paper merchants have eliminated Spec Rep jobs, it seems to me that there’s an information vacuum.

How do graphic designers, production managers, and printers get the paper information they need? How do you get inspired? Stay current?

One entrepreneur who has stepped in to fill these needs is Sabine Lenz, founder of www.PaperSpecs.com. I’ve been curious about PaperSpecs, so I recently asked Sabine to tell me more about her company’s services.

Smart planning for printing color images

One of the most mysterious parts of pricing print jobs is the pre-press cost of preparing the images for the project, whether that work is done by a printer or by a color house.

This article explains how to talk about how you want your image work to be approached, how image prep and proof costs are calculated, and how to avoid unexpected alteration charges.

What to say when reviewing color image proofs

If you feel intimidated or unsure when you review color image proofs, you’re not alone.

Many designers fear that they will have to give the color operator or print rep technical correction instructions like, “Take the magenta down 3 points overall.”

Even if you are confident that your technical instructions would be correct, there’s a good reason not to give them: If you tell a color specialist exactly what to do, he or she may do only that. There’s also more than one way to get to the intended result, and your instructions may cause unintended shifts to other areas of the image that an alternate approach would not.

So be articulate, but not a know-it-all. Your real job here is job is to describe—in garden-variety English—what you are seeing on the proof  and what you want to be seeing. This helps the color specialist focus on the results you want. Leave it to him or her to determine the best way to achieve those results.

On passing postal muster

I just hate receiving mail with those ugly little white stickers plastered onto it, don’t you? My mailing house contact calls them lim-lim stickers.

The USPO applies them because something printed at the bottom of the postcard is interfering with the clear zone, a  4-3/4″ wide by 5/8″area at the bottom right of the mailing panel/side.

See the offending text close to the bottom on the piece below?

Barcodes speed mail delivery

Automation-compatible mail gets the most efficient handling—and often, postage discounts.

The postnet barcode that represents the zip code is one key to that automation, which is the key to speedier mail delivery. This is true for both First-Class Mail and Standard Mail Letters.

If an envelope doesn’t already have a barcode, the OCR (optical character recognition) reader reads the zip code numbers in the address and ink jets a postnet barcode onto it. But if  the reader encounters other text where it plans to print that barcode—especially characters that could be interpreted as numbers—it applies the dreaded lim-lim sticker before printing the barcode. Not only that, sometimes it sticks a lim-lim on both sides of the piece!

The changing logo landscape

Today I drove past the construction site for Hyatt Place Seattle, where the colorful Hyatt Place logo caught my eye.

Of course, being the print woman I am, my first thought was, “How would I print that?”

It occurred to me that this logo could be reproduced as spot colors only on an 8-color press. The other choices would be 4-color process builds—or RGB on the web.

Curious to know more about the Hyatt Place mark, I did a little web sleuthing and learned that it was designed byLippincott, am international design and brand strategy consulting firm.

Check out Lippincott’s interesting case study about the development of the brand and take a look at more Hyatt Place brand elements there.

SVC Wayzgoose: way fun!

A wayzgoose is an old-timey party traditionally held by printers for their apprentices at the end of August.

The eighth annual Wayzgoose and Steamroller Smackdown at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts was not your run-of the-mill picnic. SVC had invited teams of local designers to carve large posters into battleship linoleum, ink them, then print them by running over them with a real steamroller!

Twelve teams accepted the challenge, including printer-designers from Fitch, Starbucks, Turnstyle, Methodologie, and Evolution Press. At the end of the day, the steamroller posters were auctioned off with proceeds going to support SVC’s letterpress programs.

The festivities also included tours of SVC’s letterpress studio and a tempting Letterpress Marketplace of printed broadsides, cards, and ephemera designed and printed by SVC students, local letterpress printers, and book artists.

As the afternoon passed, the clouds burned away. Hotdogs sizzled on the grill as bluegrass fiddlers serenaded the crowd. And big posters festooned the railings of the School of Visual Concepts, drying in the late-summer breeze.

What a fun day and fundraiser for a worthy cause!