Whether you use them for product identification or shipping, for security or promotion, or for any other use, labels are a part of every business’s inventory of printed items. The earliest use of labels was for product identification; uses now include a wide range of applications across many industries.

We’ll begin our discussion of labels with a semantics question: what is the difference between a label, a sticker, and a decal? Since many people use the terms interchangeably, we think there’s no obvious answer beyond common usage.

• When adhered to a product (such as a soup can or a piece of fruit) as a means of identifying or providing information about the product, we most often refer to the item as a label.

• When affixed to something (the bumper of a car, the front of a package, or a voter leaving the polls) in order to call attention to what is written on it, we refer to the item as a sticker.

• When the item can be moved from one surface (the substrate it is printed on) to another (a window, a model airplane,), usually with the aid of heat or water, we refer to the item as a decal.

http://macgra.com/0811Printips.pdf

If you regularly buy printing for your company or organization, you likely have a budget to meet. Whether you are ordering business stationery, functional forms and documents, or image pieces for sales and marketing, you always want to be sure you are managing the budget to get the most for your money.

We hope you won’t be surprised to learn that we have the same objective – to be sure the printed materials we provide to you are produced on time, on budget, and looking exactly as you expected. Making this happen requires a partnership between us, and in this issue, we’re going to explore some ways to ensure consistent and dependable pricing.

http://macgra.com/0810Printips.pdf

Glance around your desk. Chances are you’ve got a desktop laser printer or inkjet printer nearby your computer for making prints from the document files you or others create. These printers, so ubiquitous today, revolutionized the printing industry twenty years ago by giving us other ways besides offset printing to reproduce documents.

In the early days it was relatively easy to determine whether a document had been printed using an offset press or a copier. But as digital printing technology improved and quality reached offset level, it became clear that digital printing augmented and expanded the demand for printing in general.

Today the major difference between offset and digital printing lies in what each can be used for, and the specific situations when one technology offers an advantage over the other.

http://macgra.com/0709Printips.pdf

The term desktop publishing is generally agreed to have been coined in 1985 by Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus Corporation, following the development of Aldus PageMaker (later purchased by Adobe). In its original usage, desktop publishing meant the ability of one person to use a computer to perform what had previously been many separate functions – design, typesetting, pasteup, and preparation of camera ready artwork. Thus desktop publishing combined several disciplines (graphic design, writing, editing, typography, and page composition) into one.

Word processing, a term invented by IBM in the 1960s, predates desktop publishing by more than a decade. Early word processors were typewriters with some form of electronic editing and correction capability; later machines incorporated CRT screens (as exemplified by the Wang word processor). Eventually, dedicated word processing equipment was replaced by software applications running on personal computers. The most popular word processing program in use today is Microsoft Word.

http://macgra.com/0701Printips.pdf

Which kind of print buyer are you?

Print buyer #1: your job description includes buying printing; printing is an integral part of your company’s product or service; printed materials facilitate your company’s processes; printed materials are essential to sales and marketing; part of your annual performance evaluation includes how well you manage the printing.

Print buyer #2: your job description doesn’t have anything to do with printing; buying printing is a nuisance, an annoyance, or both; your company always seems to be running out of things, forcing you to place rush orders or beg for fast delivery; you were designated the print buyer for no particular reason.

As different as these descriptions are, they do have something in common: when the printing doesn’t show up at the right time, or if there’s a problem with it, the print buyer suffers.

If you’ve been our customer for a while, you know that we are unusually sensitive to your situation and have designed our entire company around being dependable – delivering what you order on time, without error, and at the agreed upon price. You also know that we can’t do our job properly without your help. So in this issue of Printips we will cover some ways to make print buying easier for you.

http://macgra.com/0611Printips.pdf

You may not realize that our printing business was founded in 1985. In that 25 year period, we’ve had the chance to work with hundreds of customers ranging from those whose primary job is to buy or manage printing to those who rarely need to place an order. We’ve had our share of miraculous saves – those awe-inspiring times when despite an impossible deadline and less than optimal manufacturing circumstances, the job gets done and done right. We’ve also had a few misses, where no matter how hard we tried, things just kept going wrong.

We expect you’ve had the same range of experiences – those times when you felt immense gratitude to your printer for a job well done, as well as those times when despite everyone’s best intentions, the job was a disappointment. In this issue of Printips, we’re going to share our observations gleaned from 25 years of business transactions on the best way to be totally satisfied with your printer.

http://macgra.com/0608Printips.pdf

One of the more difficult tasks we face when reproducing your printed material is to be certain the color is correct. When we are printing your business stationery, it is critical that the color remains consistent for the first and each subsequent printing. When printing your company brochure or newsletter, the color on the finished piece must conform to your expectations. And if we are printing in full color – especially photographs or food or people’s skin tones – a good color match is essential.

So why is color matching such a problem? The answer lies in a combination of how color is created and how the human eye perceives color.

http://macgra.com/0605Printips.pdf

In today’s world of easily-accessible ways to reproduce documents, from laser printers on the desktop to high speed copiers, it is interesting to pause and remember a time not too long ago when making a copy took considerably more effort. Back then, printing was distinctly different from copying, both in quality of the reproduction and the effort it took to make the copies.

In this issue of Printips, we’ll recall some of the early machines and technologies that serve as a basis for what has become digital printing. We hope you’ll enjoy reminiscing and perhaps learn something you didn’t know.

http://macgra.com/0604Printips.pdf

If you have been reading our newsletter regularly, you have probably noticed that we write a lot about the many technical aspects of printing. There’s a reason for this. We are dedicated to the idea of providing more than printing to our customers. We strive to share our knowledge and experience in a way that will benefit our customers and make the job of placing printing orders smoother.

Generally speaking, our customers can be divided into two groups – those for whom buying printing is an integral part of their job responsibilities, and those who order the printing when necessary. Our technical topics are selected with the first group in mind.

In contrast, this issue of Printips is written specifically for the second group – less technical but more practical and, we hope, useful to all our readers.

http://macgra.com/0508Printips.pdf

We’re proud to say that our prepress department is great – experienced professionals who knows all the tricks to make a file print correctly. And one of the tools that makes this possible is not a whiz-bang piece of new software, but a simple form – our prepress check list.

The form is used to collect information about your file and how it will be used, so our prepress department can accurately preflight and prepare the file for output. If you’ve never seen the form before or aren’t aware that we have one, then likely our customer service representatives have been completing the form for you prior to submitting your file to prepress.

It occurred to us that whether or not you actually complete the form, you should understand why we use it and what you can do to help. The more you know about prepress, the more likely your files will pass preflight with flying colors, and complete raster image processing (RIP) without incident. This will speed your files through prepress and produce a better result on press or our digital equipment.

http://macgra.com/0506Printips.pdf