To Print!

I was lucky enough to visit a massive printing warehouse in Kent. The company is called Creo, here's a link to their website: CREO. My Dad does some freelance work for them, so managed to get me in. I was in there on a night shift from 8pm to about 3am! This is where my prints were produced and I could explore the different machines, papers and be nosey at the whole printing process in general...

As I wanted all of my various prints on different thickness and some single sided, some double sided, they were printed on a super thin sticky back matt laminate vinyl (a kind of plastic). They were printed on a HUGE digital machine mainly all on one run.

I then took to the job of mounting everything individually by hand. This took hours! For the A6's I chose a card slightly thicker then an average postcard. I stuck one row down at a time onto the card. I had to be so careful with this and ended up using a squeegee and cloths. The vinyl is so thin once the backing is off that it easily puckers up beneath your fingers and ends up creating bubbles. This happened several times and it took a good few tries to get it right. I then had to measure up borders and place the back menus on individually. I then trimmed everything down. I left a 3mm bleed on everything and used trim lines in the print files to make sure it was all even.

For the A2s I chose a thick folding box board. A nice thickness to displays the large prints behind the bar in pubs, they will be able to just lean against back walls without creasing.

The standard teaser posters I printed on A3, but they are made for pretty much any size up to A0. These were printed on the same matt laminate but on a non sticky vinyl. So these were very simple and only needed trimming...

The A3 folding flyer was hell however! So, the front of the A3 had been printed on a sticky vinyl and the back on a non-sticky. So I need to peel off the backing and place on the non-sticky surface. This took so many tries for me to get right. I kept placing it in the wrong position or it kept bubbling as the A6s. The vinyl is so so thin which makes it super tricky. I ended up hijacking one of Creo's enormous lightboxes which allowed me to see through the vinyl and line it up properly. After all this messing around though, the 2 sides stuck together made the A3 way to thick to be used as a folding flyer. The first couple of creases were OK ( I made them on the sharp edge handle of a scalpel) The rest however was just not going to happen....

I've ended up having to print the folding flyer on a standard silk A3 white paper from a printers in London. I've matched up the paper as much as I could but it's not ideal...

Of course if this campaign was mass produced and not a one of uni project this would've been manufactured differently. The double sided would have been pressed in the same run without faffing around matching up edges by eye! They would've also been trimmed by machines. I would've had to set the artwork up with a particular bleed and specific margins. Although most large printing companies will do this for you.

I have taken samples of the paper, cards and laminates and put them in my sketchbook.