Intro to Finishing

47- folding

This episode introduces the equipment and methods for folding printed sheets of paper using standard folding catalogs and schemes.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Before we jump in to show you some of the most popular types of folding for print, take a look and hear the sound of this offline folder used in the finishing area of a print service provider.
    • All right. Hello everyone. It is Ryan and Pat with The Print University here. Pat, today we are going to talk a little bit about folding. What is the most common one? Where do we start? 
    • [00:00:27] Pat McGrew: The most common thing is to simply fold a piece of paper or a piece of card stock in half.
    • This one is from the folks at Insuraaance, and it is, again, just your standard size page, but folded in half vertically. Still mailed, right? Still has the mailing information. Still is legal to mail. Again, you have to close it, but it is a nice amount of real estate. It stands out in the mailbox. I will tell you that both of these pieces do stand out because this one has weight to it. It was done on a heavier card stock. This was done on a slicker card stock. They are both really nice pieces, and these are the most common things you can do because all you are doing is folding the page in half.
    • [00:01:58] Ryan McAbee: Really, as with most things with printing - there is that saying that everything starts in the finishing area. That is because the design has to match up perfectly with whatever kind of folding and finishing techniques you apply. And that is a good example there with the kind of horizontal design versus the vertical design because that is going to matter in how you do your creative layout.
    • I also noticed a few other things. Some of it had personalization. You can stack the finishing together. So I know we are talking about folding, but you have a lot of other components here that go into the overall piece. The other thing I think that is attractive about the half-fold is that it is simple. That is going to drive down the cost that you have for the customer who is actually purchasing it.
    • But we have another very common fold as well that goes one step further. 
    • [00:02:43] Pat McGrew: It is literally one step further. Instead of folding something in half, you can fold it in thirds. Anyone who has ever received a letter in a number 10 envelope is familiar with folding something in thirds, right? Pretty much most of the bills and statements you get these days are folded in thirds, some in half, but most in thirds.
    • Because it fits in a #10 envelope, right? So that is handy, and it gives you, again, the real estate to put all of the information you want. If this looks boring to you, it is because this was actually from our friends at Lufthansa when they lost my luggage. In the end, they print hundreds of thousands of these at a time. You can tell it is a nice mechanical fold on them because it is a tight crease, but these are on their counter in the baggage claim area so that they can help you. 
    • [00:03:32] Ryan McAbee: That is a good point about the crease because one thing that we should probably mention when it comes to folding is it matters, especially if you are using any kind of paper-based finishing, the grain direction of the paper. Because to get that nice, tight crease, you want to go with the grain, not against the grain. If you have ever received a piece in the mail or you have seen a brochure where it looked like a really jagged edge or like even the ink or toner was breaking on the edge, that is because it was folded against the grain. 
    • [00:03:58] Pat McGrew: Somebody did not plan correctly.
    • A lot of times when we talk about folding, we talk about all the design considerations. So you want to make sure that you are not putting the logo on the fold. You want to make sure that you are not putting critical information in the fold. You look at this one, and it was very carefully designed to segment the information so that it did not cross any of the folds.
    • [00:04:20] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, one of the worst things for that piece, if it was designed and you needed to fill in a form and the fill-in for it was right in the crease, because how annoying would that be for the consumer. 
    • [00:04:29] Pat McGrew: And I have had some of those. So your design becomes very important when you are doing any kind of folding. You want to make sure that you are not putting critical content into the fold.
    • [00:04:41] Ryan McAbee: So another one that is pretty popular and a good option for digital printing is not necessarily more work; it is just a different type of a fold. And it is the Z-fold. 
    • [00:04:53] Pat McGrew: It is true. The Z-folds are interesting. If you look at this, it is a kind of a classic Z-fold, right?
    • I will do it that way. Classic Z-fold. And the really interesting thing about a Z-fold - the reason you might pick it - is because of how you want to convey information. So this one is from our friends at Ricoh, and this was when they were announcing their new fifth station, their neon. So if you look at it this way and you open it, it is designed so that you will get all the information about the greens.
    • But if you turn it around and you open it this way, you get all the pinks and neons. So you can open the whole thing out and use it like this, but it was very carefully designed so that they could put it on the stacks with this side up and stacks with this side up. And it looks like it is two different brochures. It is really giving you all the information, but again, very carefully designed so that none of the information falls in any of the folds. This is a standard fold, but you want to make sure you understand that grain - this is actually very heavy cardstock. And it is a very tight crease on that fold. 
    • [00:06:09] Ryan McAbee: So that is a very practical, intelligent kind of design using that folding pattern. I know we had one that was a little bit of a curve ball because we thought it was maybe a half fold, but it actually was something else. 
    • [00:06:20] Pat McGrew: It is nice, and you have to actually look at it really carefully to figure it out.
    • So this is an American Greeting Card, right? And it is the Monopoly guy that you probably recognized, and there is stuff on the front. But if you look at it really carefully, what you will realize is this is actually another fold. So this - if I pull it apart - is really a Z-fold.
    • But they did it so that the front of the card felt really heavy and really rich. I do not know if you can tell; it is embellished. This has a silver toner embellishment on it. And then on the inside, it actually has a tip-on piece, which is another kind of interestingly complex piece of finishing that you can get involved in. But it is cool.
    • It was a little unexpected for us to find this one. 
    • [00:07:06] Ryan McAbee: So I have to say, at this point, there are many different folding patterns that are standard in a catalog that when you go do your impositioning, and this is something that a prepress person does to prepare the file correctly so that it can actually be printed and finished.
    • There is a huge standard kind of catalog, and we are going to go through two more examples that are a little bit more complex in terms of how they fold. So the next one we are going to talk about is the eight-page gatefold. And it has some unique design considerations, right Pat? 
    • [00:07:32] Pat McGrew: Challenges. Yeah, it does.
    • So this one is from the folks at Tommy John, who do underwear. This is a direct mail piece, so it does have a thing on the back you will see very often. See these postcards; you will see them in business offices. A lot of different kinds of businesses use these because it is a really nice format and it could be mailed or not mailed.
    • This one is a short, smaller format, but I have seen them in full, letter size. I have seen them even bigger, 11 x 17 size. This gatefold - you open it this way, but then it opens again, right? That is the tricky part here.
    • So from a design perspective, you have a couple of things. You want to make sure you understand the grain because you really want this to be a good solid crease. And it is going to be thick because it is wrapping around now to what are effectively two more sheets. You also want to make sure you understand your panels and how your panels are going to behave.
    • I could be a really mean person and fold it a different way. I could have folded it this way, right? There are all sorts of ways I could fold it, but when I choose to do a gatefold, from a design perspective, make sure that you are providing the right kind of information on the right panel because you want to intrigue someone to open up all the panels.
    • If you fail to make it interesting, they may not realize that they are supposed to open it one more time. 
    • [00:09:01] Ryan McAbee: The other tricky thing about the gatefolds - if you just open it halfway, you can do crossover images, and that is even more tricky because then it is an alignment thing.
    • If that was just one solid image there and not two different ones, you have to think about getting the alignment just right. That falls on the operator at the folder to make sure that they have everything aligned.
    • [00:09:21] Pat McGrew: That they stay in alignment.
    • When you are trying to make anything line up - and it does not matter whether it is a half-fold or a tri-fold, and you are trying to match the interior  - when you are trying to match two images up, there is a little bit more complexity involved.
    • So you want to be planning. If you really do not need to do it, do not do it. Right? 
    • [00:09:50] Pat McGrew: Take advantage, make the pizzazz, make the unfolding experience. Take it to the inside if you want that longer, that bigger experience. Remember, we are showing it this way. This can be this way too. I mean, it can be vertical. We have a lot of infographics that I see on trade show floors done this way. So they will do it with the side out, and then they will make it so that it opens out that way. So there are a lot of things you can do, but this is not the last fold we have. 
    • No, we are going to go into what is called the eight-page French Fold.
    • So what is that all about? 
    • Perhaps you have, in your life, gotten things that are multiple folds. Think of it as a map fold. I think we have talked about this before, right? If you have ever tried to refold a map, you know how fun that is. But in the end, what we are going for is something that is portable in format when it is folded, but then gives you a lot of real estate to play with - and in some cases, turns into a poster.
    • [00:10:54] Pat McGrew: Which is what this one does. This is actually from a lovely company that I met in Italy called Magnus. And was provided by the team at TAGA Italia, which is one of the trade associations in Italy. But the really cool thing is this one also has a really cool substrate.
    • Where we have looked at a lot of card stock, and we have looked at a lot of lighter-weight stock; this is actually like plastic. It is a really interesting waterproof kind of stock. So one of the things we were talking about was if you think about grocery stores, you do not see it as much in the US anymore, but if you walk through any European grocery store, there is always this wall of brochures before you exit the store and it is everything from all the regulatory thing they have to tell you about everything that is on the store shelves. What the ingredients are, any kind of special handling information, but also just a whole lot of things about the programs, the store, sponsors. How green they are. How sustainable they are. Recycling programs. And that is what they were pitching this for. But they wanted to be able to make it kind of a find. So this is why it opens. It opens, and then it opens into the poster. This is a brilliant marketing piece, and it is a great leave-behind. Imagine if you were selling a complex product. and you wanted to walk someone through the product, and then maybe you open it out into a poster of the product or the workflow of the product or maybe the sustainability cycle of the product. These kinds of things that fold down to a smaller portable format are really nice for that. 
    • [00:12:36] Ryan McAbee: What struck me as you were saying that is that we see these kinds of folds in other places where you have to get that amount of information in a very compact format. If you think about your drugs, your pharmaceuticals - it is usually black and white - but they often have these multiple-fold patterns because they are trying to tuck it into a box, and they only have so much room.
    • And then it goes to expand out, so you, as the consumer, can read all the information. 
    • [00:13:00] Pat McGrew: Those are called Instructions for Use, and they require some amazing folding equipment. Not just anybody can fold something down into a tiny little square or a tiny little oblong. If you have ever bought yard chemicals at your favorite home store - typically, on the outside, there is a little pouch that has something that you pull out. Those Instructions for Use in your pharmacy boxes or bottles - the folds on those are crazy. Designing for them is a challenge because you are designing for teeny tiny type, but it still has to be legally legible.
    • [00:13:42] Ryan McAbee: Very good point. So I think that is what leads us to our takeaways here: Number one - there are a lot of folding patterns. A lot of ways that you can do your origami, and get to different sizes. Then it boils down to the creative aspect. And it is a balancing act between the creative and the cost.
    • If you are doing a more complex fold, like a gatefold, especially with a crossover image, you are probably going to have more cost than if it is a simple half-fold. And then it obviously comes down to your use case. How is it going to be used? Does it need to go through the mail stream?
    • All of those kinds of questions. This is just scratching the surface of folding, but it is something that is done to a lot of the print work that is out there.

48- the world of finishing

This module is a general discussion of the many finishing techniques used for the different types of products in publication, transactional, marketing, and commercial print applications.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition at The Print University. I am joined by Pat McGrew of McGrewGroup. And, of course, this is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and we are talking about the wide world of finishing, Pat. I know that we both love it because that is where you can see all of this hard work that came before it, and how it actually gets into a finalized product, right? 
    • [00:00:21] Pat McGrew: The interesting thing about finishing is that it can be a substantial contributor to your margin. If you are running a print business, your ability to finish in efficient but unique ways can give you a leg up when you are bidding on certain types of work. Your ability to finish efficiently - say book finishing, which you are seeing here, but even direct mail, finishing, print and mail inserting - all of those things give you a leg up.
    • It is a world full of machines. They come in every size, and every shape; mechanical to automated, and every function. Some of them can feed data into dashboards. Some of them just sit there and do stuff. It is just an amazing world. 
    • [00:00:58] Ryan McAbee: Some of them appear to be from the time of Gutenberg because that is how long some of this equipment lasts. 
    • [00:01:02] Pat McGrew: Especially when you talk about a lot of the mechanical processes. If you are cutting something, there is not a lot to add to that. You can automate it, but in many organizations, you make an investment in a really solid piece of equipment, and it absolutely can last almost forever. 
    • [00:01:19] Ryan McAbee: The finishing looks different depending on what type of product or application you are actually producing. We have four major categories here. If you are curious why you do not see any kind of folding carton or packaging-related things, it is because we do not really call that finishing. That is more of a converting operation. So that will be in a different module a little bit later on. But Pat, do you want to walk us through some of these major application categories and what type of finishing you would expect? 
    • [00:01:46] Pat McGrew: Let's start with book finishing because it is something I think everybody thinks they understand and do not always understand just how complex it is to get all those pages in the right order, and bound so that they can be wrapped with a cover, right? That is a tricky thing to do on a good day.
    • Book finishing looks a little different depending on whether you are coming from an analog offset type of press. Whether you are coming from a roll-fed analog press, a sheet-fed analog press, or a digital device. Again, different for sheet-fed versus roll-fed. In general, roll-fed anything is going to look one way, and sheet-fed anything is going to look another.
    • If we are going to do book finishing, sheetfed, we are dealing with printed sheets that have been imposed into pages. They have to be cut down into their pages, and gathered into their folios so that the pages wind up in the right order - so you do not wind up with page one and page 50 on the back of it because we do not want that. That is not helpful. Once we have it collated in the right order based on how it is going to be assembled - now it is going to be stacked. Very often, it is put on a saddle device that causes that bend. Books are often finished in folios. Maybe a 16 or a 24 or a larger folio. They are groups of pages that are stitched. 
    • [00:02:58] Ryan McAbee: And another term that you find on the production side, other than folio, is signatures. That is the vernacular.
    • [00:03:02] Pat McGrew: Publishers talk about folios, and the printers talk about signatures. Once you have one or more of those put together, you have to glue them together - finish them on the back end. Now you are going to have to wrap the cover around it, and that might be a soft cover. It might be a casebound book, a hardback book, right? There are processes for each one of those. It is not all that different when you do roll-fed, but now the pages are actually coming out in the right order already. We do not have to collate that piece. We still have to cut, stack, create the signatures, and get it the rest of the way through the finishing process. The last thing that we are going to do is trim. In fact, there are multiple trimming operations that happened during the building of a book. Then you have your final book, where it has been assembled.
    • There are machines that do all of it, right? Where you can have a roll-fed device. It can be analog. It can be digital. More commonly in digital, where literally the book equipment is attached to the press. Books come out, paper comes out, and they go into all these automated processes. It is like watching a Rube Goldberg machine, or a mouse trap. It is amazing. And they do everything. They bring the covers in when they are needed from a separate feed, and they can create anything from a book of one, a single copy of a book, all the way through to long runs of books. Book finishing is a real art form, and people who do it well typically do it very efficiently. That is not to discount the people who do the very custom, fine handwork that is still a business. Where things are assembled by hand and maybe gold foiled by hand; all sorts of pretty things. But the vast majority of book finishing is done as automated as possible with a combination of mechanical processes. 
    • [00:04:46] Ryan McAbee: On the book finishing side, it is really about how the cover is going to be applied to that text block. And that can be the glue, then sewn. If it is hardbound, it is often something called casebound or sewn. We do have a separate module just on binding techniques, so check that out. It really is related a lot to the book finishing. 
    • [00:05:01] Pat McGrew: Yeah, and many companies, and perhaps your company, might not have begun as a book printer. Today there is such a demand for book printing, especially low-volume book printing, that many printing companies have found that there is a nice revenue stream if they add a little bit of binding capability into their environment. It can be a really good revenue stream.
    • Books are not going anywhere. 
    • [00:05:22] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, that is true. We saw a little bit of resurgence as everybody did not have anything else alternative to do, and it has held on. 
    • [00:05:28] Pat McGrew: Yeah, it does not seem to have tailed off very much. I think people have rediscovered the fun of sitting with a book and a cup of coffee or their favorite adult beverage, and they continue to buy them.
    • Most of the time when I fly, there are people getting on the plane with books. They are very comfortable reading books. 
    • [00:05:42] Ryan McAbee: That is funny you said that. I often see, when I have been on planes lately, that there are more physical books than Kindles and e-readers.
    • Which is interesting because that is a change. 
    • [00:05:49] Pat McGrew: Yeah, it went to the e-reader, and then it has come back.
    • Then we have transactional finishing. We have talked a little bit about this in modules around the transaction marketplace. So transaction print is typically sheets, right?
    • Might be 8.5" x 11", or it might be A4. It might be 5" x 7". There is monarch size. There are a lot of different sizes these days that your utility bill or your credit card bill, your bank statement, or your retirement statement might come in. A lot of this print today is printed on roll-fed high-speed digital devices.
    • Transactional is the home of digital printing for the most part. Most print begins as white paper and is printed in full color, and then it goes into its finishing process. It might need to be perfed. It might need to have the sheets cut apart, horizontally and longitudinally. It might require other kinds of folding. Sometimes you will see them very long. You will see them almost legal size so that there are actually two folds. Sometimes you see there are four-folds, rather than three-folds. Sometimes you see them just in the tri-fold, so they fit in a #10 envelope. 
    • There are all sorts of variations that you might see. It comes out in a roll-fed environment - out of the press - and it will get whatever perfing and cutting it needs. It will go into a folder, and then that folded piece will get inserted into an envelope. In most cases, it is pre-collated because of how it has been done. There are methodologies where you might be printing 20-inch wide paper on a roll. Left side pages and right side pages belong to the same piece - so it might be page one, page two, page three, page four. In those cases, they will be slit and merged on their way into the inserting process. It can become pretty complex. 
    • If it is coming from a sheet-fed device, it might be a little bit different because of the same things we talked about on the book side, where we have to make sure we have the right front and right back, in the right page order. There is a print and collate option, but on most sheet-fed printers, the processes for doing that are highly automated. Many insurance policies are still printed on toner devices that are sheetfed, 8.5" x 11" pages, and the collation is just automatic. The gathering is automatic, and it makes it very easy for them to be folded into envelopes.
    • In some cases where it is being done on larger format sheets, then the same thing we just talked about around slitting and merging - those processes are typically very automated but require a different set of equipment.
    • [00:08:12] Ryan McAbee: To me, the most interesting thing about the transactional world is that we know at the end of the day, it has to be put into an envelope, and it has to be picked up by a postal service. That is the most fascinating part to watch on the shop floor because you see it inserting into the envelope, then doing its metering and sealing and all that stuff to get into the mail.
    • [00:08:32] Pat McGrew: And it does not always involve an envelope. There are devices in the market that are self-enveloping, right? Sometimes it is pre-converted paper. What we mean by that is that it is a very special type of paper that is loaded into the machine that is designed to print the information on the inside and then fold everything up and seal it and send it directly out into the mail bucket. In a very complex series of maneuvers, cutting and perfing, and gluing. Those are very cool machines. I first started seeing them about 15 years ago. They went away for a little while, but they seem to be coming back with a vengeance. There are all sorts of vendors out there today who are actively selling these self-enveloping solutions into the transaction marketplace. Some of that is because envelopes have become hard to find.
    • In the case of transaction print and mail in a roll-fed environment, there are unwinds, and there are rewinds. If you are going to go roll-to-roll and then do offline or nearline finishing, some devices will have to have primers if additional work is going to be done on top of them. Sometimes they want to be overcoated. There are still a lot of people sending transactional mail out on postcards, so utility bills and things like that. Sometimes those have to be post-coated, so they get through the mail stream okay. 
    • There are also really interesting inspection systems in the transaction space because you do not want somebody else's bills. We have to be watching what is coming in, matching it up, and making sure that you only get your pages and that your pages get into the correct envelope and not with a piece of someone else's. We want to be able to verify it. There is a lot of postmarking in transactions, so once the envelope is put together, it may have another print device that adds a barcode to the outside of the envelope to make sure that it can be tracked. We talked in another episode about piece-level tracking.
    • When you jump over to marketing mail, everything we talked about - collating and all that stuff is all true. But marketing mail can be almost any size on almost any kind of paper, any kind of substrate. It takes an interesting set of machines to do some of the fancy work.
    • In an organization that produces a lot of marketing mail and stuff that shows up in your mailbox, they might be doing catalogs - kind of like books. They follow some of that workflow protocol. They might be doing things that are like postcards that fold in half and maybe have a cutout. In those cases, there is cutting that has to go on, and, if it is going to fold in half, it has to be sealed. There are processes for getting a wafer seal on it so that it can travel through the mail stream - that is its own machine. 
    • Marketing mail is often embellished. Marketing mail might have spot varnishes to call out elements of an image, whether it is on a postcard or it is part of a card, or even a catalog. It might have foil to make it shiny. It might have stamping, embossing, and debossing to give it texture. Then it still has to get through the mail stream. 
    • There is a term you will see here called tipping - and we are not actually handing money to the operator. They would probably appreciate it.
    • [00:11:32] Ryan McAbee: I am sure I would. 
    • [00:11:33] Pat McGrew: But tipping is when we are adding something else to the paper, usually with a glue or some sort of adhesive. If you have ever received something like this in the mail - this is one that I just got. It is a card from the nice Disney people. This is the kind of thing that got tipped on with glue. You probably can see right here it is a little shinier. That process is called tipping when you are putting something on, and you will see it with the kind of fake personal Post-It notes. Also, credit cards and debit cards are typically tipped on to the carrier so that they do not go running around the envelope while they are in the mail stream.
    • That last line at the bottom is kitting. That is really the process of assembling a variety of things. It might be different pieces of paper, but it could also be 3D objects like cups and pens, and flashlights to gather them together into a package that is going to go out to the target recipient.
    • [00:12:31] Ryan McAbee: You could even lump this into marketing. Now these days, just as a visual for kitting, is the subscription box, right? You are putting print with things, so it is a similar process. Before we go forward into the commercial, if you could go through some terminology that we may not have defined? 
    • Tipping you obviously covered. Varnish and coating are terms that are very similar, but different. Where varnish is usually just covering a specific area of the printed piece, and coating is usually a flood coat where it is covering the entire printed piece or the full format size. In terms of the finish, it could be a gloss or a dull kind of coating, so it could look shiny, or it could look dull. It is going to highlight the image areas differently than the rest of the piece. If it is a spot varnish like that.
    • Embossing and debossing we talked about - gives texture to it. Embossing basically raises the paper, debossing lowers the paper versus the rest of it. Then Pat, how would you best explain a primer? I feel like we do see that more in the transactional, but it is a lot of time needed for roll-fed devices to be able to print on a wider range of paper.
    • [00:13:24] Pat McGrew: Yeah, it is a substrate-specific issue. When we start talking, especially about digital printing, a lot of the paper that we print on was really designed for analog. It was not really designed for digital. Sometimes there are challenges in getting heavy coverage to stick to the paper without transferring during the printing process, front to back. One of the ways you help the process along is by putting very specific kinds of primer coats in the same way we do when painting the walls of your house, right? What the primer does is the same thing the primer does on your walls. It basically creates a barrier between what was there before and the ink that you are going to be putting on the paper. The primer is designed to accept whatever the ink or the toner is that you are trying to use. We see it a lot in inkjet. More and more, paper manufacturers have gotten really good about creating new stocks that can be used for both analog and digital without requiring primers. For certain kinds of coverage on certain kinds of substrates, that is just one more thing that adds cost to the process. That is typically done before print. When it comes into the finishing workflow, you do not get cracking, you do not get peeling, and you do not get rubbing that you might get otherwise. 
    • [00:14:37] Ryan McAbee: Cracking would be caused when it is folded, and it cracks the ink layer, or when you are doing it in the opposite grain direction of the paper itself. 
    • [00:14:45] Pat McGrew: Yeah. And it is probably worth mentioning die-cutting. It is a very mechanical process when something is die-cut. It means that physically some form has been made out of metal usually, and it is mounted on a piece of equipment.
    • [00:14:58] Ryan McAbee: That is the part called the die.
    • [00:14:59] Pat McGrew: As the substrate goes under it, it chops out what it needs, and it creates waste to the side of it. That is one way of doing it, and that has been the most common way to do it for years, in volume. It is fast, and it is efficient. We also now have motion cutters, and motion cutters are laser cutters that can be programmed to do the same thing that a die cut does. A lot of organizations started investing in motion cutters, especially as runs got smaller and as they saw requests for more complex object cuts. Because every die can cost into the thousands for a good die of complex shapes to be made. They do not last forever. The dies have to be replaced, and so you keep making that investment over and over.
    • Where a laser cutter is programmable, the cost is just the programming. Then you can store that program and use it over and over again and modify it as you need. If you have ever walked a trade show floor, you will see a lot of them where they are cutting out poker chips, or I saw one cutting out a musical g clef note. Doing the thing with your name being cut out of the middle of a sheet. They accomplished the same thing, but one is a very mechanical process. One is definitely a very IT-oriented process.
    • [00:16:04] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, a more digital process. The other thing with dies is that you have to handle them with care too. If they get hit or nicked, it may cause a problem with the actual form that is in there, and they will not cut out properly from that point. For people coming into the industry, a die has one use. Each time you change the way you lay out the graphics and so forth on the printed sheet, the die has to change, or you have to have a new separate die. Sometimes you can finagle and reposition them. The brilliant thing about the motion cutters is that they are fully programmable because they use a laser head. It can be different from one job to the next, and we are seeing those use cases.
    • For commercial printing, it can be really anything and everything. For commercial in particular versus the other three - you see a lot more of what is referred to as handwork in finishing. That is literally people touching something to either insert it, adhere it, to glue it, attach it, whatever the case may be. You will find that a lot in the commercial area.
    • Finishing can be what is referred to as inline, nearline, or offline, as we have listed here. Walk us through how you see the difference between inline, nearline, and offline. We do not have nearline listed as a definition here, but we will cover it. 
    • [00:17:07] Pat McGrew: Yeah. It dovetails to offline. Inline is exactly what I described for those book printing operations, where the roll feeds directly into the book block maker - the thing that makes the main part of the book and covers are fed in - fundamentally, no one is touching it.
    • When you have an inline finishing process from the point where the paper goes into the press to the point where the product comes out finished, in many cases, no one ever touches it unless there is a problem along the way. 
    • [00:17:35] Ryan McAbee: And I think that is the key, right? It is an automatic process that happens. At least one finishing step is an automatic process after the printing is completed. 
    • [00:17:42] Pat McGrew: It can be more expensive to set it up. The equipment that is typically bolted into the printing process costs a little bit more. It does, in some ways, constrain you, because now your press is feeding directly into a very specific set of inline processes.
    • People have gotten very fancy within inline, especially in a roll-fed environment. They can put multiple turn bars. So sometimes the paper can go into one inline path. Sometimes it will go into a different inline path, but then it can also go out to a roll for offline or nearline finishing.
    • All of the things you see here and all of the applications that we have talked about lend themself to inline finishing. There is nothing magic about inline other than a business decision to create the maximum amount of efficiency. A lot of businesses will do that if they only do one or two kinds of work.
    • If you are a transaction printer and that is what you do, and maybe you do some direct mail, but it is all letter mail or looks like letter mail, then inline finishing can make a great deal of sense for you. The challenge is if you have invested in very high-speed equipment, that your finishing equipment can run at the same speed as your printing equipment, so that you are not losing time as things are finishing. You do not want to slow the press down. If you slow the press down, then you are losing capacity and opportunity. 
    • [00:19:00] Ryan McAbee: And in the digital world, that has been more of a complaint or concern on the cut-sheet side, because often the inline finishing,  like a booklet maker as an example, it cannot run as fast as what the actual print engine can run.
    • That is maybe the case for nearline, where you are barcoding and using a scanner to preload, and preset the equipment as much as possible to go from job to job. What is interesting here, is that it lays out perfectly on the screen here, working from left to right; you probably see more inline working left. Then once you get right into the commercial, you probably find more offline equipment than inline equipment. 
    • [00:19:31] Pat McGrew: Yeah, absolutely, because the offline concept is that you take that print pallet or roll into another room or another area in order to have the final finishing processing completed. For a lot of organizations, decisions to do things offline or nearline were made because of the real difference in speed capabilities. Also, it gives you a lot more flexibility. If you were a shop that does a lot of different kinds of things, you are not just a transaction shop, but you do transaction. You are not just a bookshop, you also do marketing mail. You are not just a direct mail shop, but you also do static commercial and maybe some books and catalogs. The flexibility, the freedom to move the work where it needs to go to get finished and to finish it as efficiently as possible can add a lot of value.
    • There is no one right answer. It really comes down to the work done in the shop. It is one of those things that you revisit every once in a while, depending on how your business is changing. 
    • [00:20:25] Ryan McAbee: And also, the technology changes. 
    • [00:20:26] Pat McGrew: Finishing has gotten faster.
    • [00:20:27] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. What new possibilities are out there? It has become more connected, which offers other advantages versus a piece that is not able to do that.
    • Here are some fast facts for finishing. Literally, every organization and service provider out there probably has at least one, if not multiple pieces of finishing.
    • The other interesting thing is that there are what are called trade finishers. They literally just do the finishing work for other printers. That is common for things that are more specialized that you do not run into every day. Perfect binding is an example where you may outsource that to a trade finisher. Any other kind of thoughts around this opportunity?
    • [00:21:02] Pat McGrew: Especially for organizations that are trying to decide if they are going to move into a new business to create a new revenue stream - they might have all the printing capability they need and not have the finishing capability. They may contract with one of those trade finishers until they figure out if they really have that business that they can sell. Then at that point make an investment in their own finishing equipment for whatever they have been job shopping out.
    • There is always some work that may always lend itself to outsourcing. Even a book printer. If most of what you do is softcover books of a certain size and somebody wants to buy a casebound book from you, you may send that book out to be finished because you do not want to bring in casebound finishing capabilities. That can make a lot of sense for organizations that do maybe 10% of their work as one thing, and everything else is the finishing that they already own. 
    • Remember that in trade relationships, you are fundamentally paying wholesale for that work, so you still have the opportunity as a printer to create some margin for the kind of work that you are sending out to be done.
    • [00:21:56] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, I think it makes sense where the finishing is more specialized, or you do not do enough volume of it. And I think that is exactly what you were saying. 
    • [00:22:02] Pat McGrew: Yeah, we have seen people do it for foiling. To add foils to covers and to add specialized kinds of spot varnishes to things. 
    • [00:22:08] Ryan McAbee: I love this particular graphic because it shows that there is no single finishing equipment that looks the same as another. 
    • [00:22:15] Pat McGrew: Yeah, everything from your hand grommet presser to some of these things can be room size, right? If you walk into a typical print shop that does any kind of print and marketing mail or transactional mail or any kind of marketing collateral, book publishing - some of these machines get quite big.
    • [00:22:33] Ryan McAbee: Just to highlight some examples here. I believe we have a collator inserter type of equipment. 
    • [00:22:38] Pat McGrew: Exactly. Yep. 
    • [00:22:39] Ryan McAbee: We have the grommet that we mentioned. The hand-based operation and grommet, upper left. What is this red one that is here, Pat? I cannot make it out.
    • [00:22:45] Pat McGrew: That one is actually complex. It is a sorter, inserter, and mail collator. It does a lot of similar processes to the one that you see with the tower at the top, but it does it in a slightly different formation and has some slightly different features.
    • Some of these machines have the ability to read barcodes and configure themselves on the fly to get the mail out collated and put together in the way it needs. Others require some manual fiddling in order to set the machine up for every single job. 
    • [00:23:11] Ryan McAbee: It looks almost like it could be a nearline finishing operation where you take the printed roll of paper that came off the press. Load it up, and it looks like it is slicing it or splitting the two halves, then going through a process where it looks like it is a finished magazine or a brochure out the end.
    • [00:23:25] Pat McGrew: It can also be just stacks of papers. The one at the left at the top next to the grommet thing. There are three machines in a row that you will see going top to bottom - they all look a little bit the same. They are all the same color. That is basically an unwind operation going into another device that might be adding perforation, might be cutting, might be slitting. There are a bunch of things that can be going on underneath that blue cover and then pushing it out as a series of stacks. Collated book blocks. Collated pieces to go into an insertion event. Or it can go roll to roll. When you see things going roll to roll, sometimes that happens because you need to reverse the order of the roll in order for it to go into the next operation. In order for things to feed into the insertion equipment correctly.
    • The next one down is a little bit more complex in that it is performing multiple operations. It is not only adding perforations, but it is also splitting and ultimately producing stacks. Anything that you can think of to do with paper, there is a piece of finishing equipment to do it. 
    • Even down in the bottom left corner. You see the hands getting near something that looks very sharp. Simple things that we do not always think of as finishing, but really are - drill presses that put three-hole punches into stacks of paper to be put into a binder. Things like pitch books and education primers sometimes are delivered that way.
    • [00:24:44] Ryan McAbee: The same thing also happens for coil binding or spiral binding. Again, we have these binding techniques in that other module. 
    • [00:24:49] Pat McGrew: There is a lot of it, and that bottom one is a closer look at what happens when things are being inserted inline. Basically, stuff is being pulled, inserted, and collated into a mail package, which is then ultimately going to be inserted.
    • [00:25:03] Ryan McAbee: Lots of variety there. Walk us through the roles in the finishing department and what that typically looks like when you are on the floor. 
    • [00:25:08] Pat McGrew: We find a lot of people in the printing industry started in the finishing department because there are roles in finishing departments in every city in the country. This is an area that often people come into, and then they learn, and they get moved into different positions.
    • They get pushed into a print shop run or different areas of the business. Machine operators are amazing people. Some of these machines are very manual. Some of them are more automated, but they all have to be maintained. 
    • We look for people who have a really good eye. We look for people who are very detailed because we want them to notice if a blade seems to be dull on a cutter or a perforator. We want them to notice if things seem to be getting a little ragged. We want them to notice if a machine sounds wrong and might need some help. 
    • We want them to be aware of mechanical processes, right? We do not want people who are going to stick their hands in the middle of it. We want people who are interested in learning about how paper behaves in the context of finishing. Lots and lots of jobs up to and including your friendly forklift operator. 
    • Now in some sites, that is a job that is going away. It is not massive yet, but in some cases, automated guided vehicles are actually taking over the role of moving big rolls of paper or big pallets of paper - raw paper - to the front end of the printing process and then moving between the back end of the printing process and into the finishing process.
    • [00:26:32] Ryan McAbee: Yes, that will trickle out as the cost dynamics change, and it becomes more of a common practice in the industry. I think it is worth going back to your previous comment because there was a very large printing outfit that, as part of their internship program, you have to do a rotation in the bindery. It goes to this kind of saying that I love, and it is basically: It all starts in the bindery. It all starts in finishing, and that is absolutely true. If you are a prepress operator, you have to understand how it is going to fold, how it is going to stitch, how it is going to, this, that, and the other. Because if you do not lay it out properly, they will not be able to do that once it gets printed and into the finishing department. The same thing is true if you are a printer, if you are a print operator, or a press operator. You have to at least have some kind of basic understanding that this is laid out correctly, and it has the right marks that they are going to need to go into the finishing equipment later downstream.
    • [00:27:13] Pat McGrew: I honestly believe that even your sales team members and your marketing team members absolutely should spend some time shadowing in those departments so that they understand that every time they make a mistake in a specification, there are consequences. 
    • [00:27:25] Ryan McAbee: And understand the capabilities that you have in-house versus outsourcing. 
    • [00:27:29] Pat McGrew: Yeah. Absolutely. 
    • [00:27:29] Ryan McAbee: That is Finishing 101. I hope you got to see the diversity of equipment and capability across all the different types of printing. We hope that you join us here at The Print University.

49- embellishments

An introduction of different in-line and offline embellishments that can be used to enhance standard printing, followed by a show-and-tell. Techniques range from foils to specialty inks and beyond.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am with my friend Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting. We have a really shiny topic for you today. It is embellishment. Ryan, when we talk about embellishment, it can be all sorts of things. It can be something from just a little shiny dot put on the top of a line. It can be just massive amounts of foil in color. It can be an explosion of glitter. It can be all sorts of things. One of the things we want to do is establish what embellishment is and then what we are going to wiggle our way toward what it really looks like.
    • [00:00:34] Ryan McAbee: I will let you explain what it is. If we take a step back even, why would you want to do it? If you are a designer or if you are an ad agency or if you are a global brand or even a small brand, and you want to differentiate yourself in the marketplace or have something that will stand out and get attention versus something your competitor down the street does. Embellishments offer a very visual way to do that. Whether it is from a business card all the way to all the kinds of embellishments you can have on packaging and marketing collateral that goes out to your audience. That is the why. What type of print embellishments do we see out there, Pat? 
    • [00:01:06] Pat McGrew: It is everything. As we said, business cards. Very often, we will see a logo that is shinier than the rest of the card, just to make it stand out. Sometimes we see it embossed so that it looks a little bit different. If your business is in manufacturing, maybe you are putting some of your products onto the business cards to help link the person and the product, and you might make those shinier than the rest.
    • Sometimes we do it for graphic beauty in the best way. Sometimes we put gold foils and silver foils, and now even colored foils onto pieces. So business cards have seen a lot of embellishment over the last five or six years. It has gotten easier to do. The prices have come down.
    • We use it also in catalogs. We use it in marketing collateral. We use it anywhere we are trying to call attention to some element of the communication that we are delivering. For every kind of embellishment, whether it is foil or making it shiny or making it glittery or making it look like a hologram, there are a dozen ways we can get there.
    • It is a really interesting business, and it is getting more interesting every year as there are more options for digital embellishment that are considered greener processes because they are a little more recyclable than some of the more analog processes that traditionally have not been as recyclable.
    • [00:02:21] Ryan McAbee: I think that is a good point to make here. Just like we have had the conversation around the differences between analog and digital printing. The same thing is really true in the embellishment world. You have analog ways to do foiling and embossing and all these other techniques that we see listed here, but the real change in the marketplace is that there is now digital equipment to do that.
    • As you said, it not only has a green aspect in the fact that it may use less chemical base and so on and so forth, but the cost dynamics have changed, particularly for smaller quantities. It is removing processes or steps required for the printer to do these kinds of techniques.
    • It was pretty remarkable. I sat in on a panel recently, and their particular embellishment technique literally saved them hours of makeready - analog versus digital. That is a huge time-saving and cost-saving that can be passed along. 
    • [00:03:07] Pat McGrew: And a lot of waste savings. All the things that we have talked about in terms of analog versus digital for the printing process also apply to the embellishment process. Typically, a digital embellishment process has less waste, is more sustainable, and is actually very easy to add to a workflow. In most cases, it is just one more layer in the design file that is very specific to the kind of embellishment. Might be one layer, or might be multiple layers that are specific to the embellishments that you are adding. The interesting thing about embellishment is that it is not one thing only. You can combine embellishments. You can stack them. You can deboss something and then add foil to the deboss so that it is sunk in. Then you can add some spot varnish somewhere else on that same piece and call out other elements of the design. It is an area that has some amazing machines that support it. 
    • [00:03:58] Ryan McAbee: If you are a salesperson in the industry or if you are a print service provider in the industry, it is more and more approachable, too, in terms of getting into it. One way to easily dip a toe into it is that a lot of the digital printing equipment you may have, or may purchase in your next cycle, offer additional printing units so you can use special colors. You can use varnishes, and you can use metallics. So definitely investigate that. 
    • [00:04:19] Pat McGrew: Yeah, sometimes in line with your printing process. If you freeze this frame, you will see the names of a lot of the companies that do this kind of work. 
    • [00:04:26] Ryan McAbee: And there are more.
    • [00:04:27] Pat McGrew: MGI, Harris & Bruno, Scodix, KURZ. FUJIFILM has their new Revoria box. Xerox sells their Iridesse. There is a company called Xaar that does some really interesting high-laydown work. The new Kodak Ascend does that one-pass process.
    • [00:04:42] Ryan McAbee: Most of the digital print manufacturers that make printing equipment have some sort of capability in this realm. 
    • [00:04:49] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. It is always worth talking to your print providers to see who they recommend that is highly compatible with the printing presses that you have.
    • [00:04:57] Ryan McAbee: Embellishment is one of those interesting kinds of processes because you have to know what you are designing upfront or what the end result you want to have is. It takes an extra step versus just a normal CMYK print job. 
    • [00:05:11] Pat McGrew: It does because the embellishment has to be registered appropriately in the same way you want your cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to be registered. Your embellishment has to line up. The design process often has helpers and aids to help you make sure that it does that. The other thing is that you may be applying multiple kinds of embellishment to a piece, some of which involve things like foil and varnish, but some involve cutting. It can be a very complex design file that you end up creating, and you have to make sure that you are using your embellishment in such a way that you are not covering up a logo when you are not supposed to. 
    • You also want to pay attention to things like creases and folds and where glue has to go. If you are doing a piece that has to be glued in any way or where wafer tabs have to go, it takes a lot of thought. The good news is that every single one of these vendors has design guides that they will be delighted to deliver. If you are supporting an organization that supports embellishment and you have not talked to your vendor about a design guide that you could share with your clients, this is a good time to do that. 
    • [00:06:14] Ryan McAbee: On top of the design guides, they also have new toolsets and software to help you create these layers and automate the creation of the layers. Pat and I talk a lot about automation and building automation into your system. This is one of those reasons. If you automate the regular printing, this gives you the opportunity to focus on the higher value applications like embellishment and put your top designer and your top pre-press operator on to this type of work - which they will probably enjoy because it gives them a bit of a challenge. You get a higher margin return in the end too. 
    • [00:06:46] Pat McGrew: Absolutely true. I mean, this is something that can be added to any print shop today with minimal disruption to the workflow and production. 
    • [00:06:54] Ryan McAbee: Now, let's take a look at some of this stuff. We are going to play a little bit of a fun game here where it is basically stump Ryan. Can Ryan name the embellishment technique that is used?
    • [00:07:05] Pat McGrew: Great. I have two here that I think you will understand. So here is one. Can you see it? This envelope has a little donut sticking out of it. Yes. And then here is this one. It has the golf ball sticking out of it here. 
    • [00:07:19] Ryan McAbee: So it would have to be cut in some way for the irregular shape. So I am going to guess it is contour cutting or die cutting, depending on digital or analog. 
    • [00:07:27] Pat McGrew: This one happens to come from a company called W+D. This one was actually manufactured by the Victor Envelope Company. There are companies like Highcon - another company that creates equipment that can do these really interesting contours.
    • And it takes a special kind of design to make this happen because you have to oversize the design. You want things to stick out. But this is legal to go through the mail. So this can be a really easy option if you are supporting customers that have the kinds of products that lend themselves to something just a little different.
    • [00:08:00] Ryan McAbee: If you get that in the mail versus your normal #10 envelope, you are going to notice. 
    • [00:08:04] Pat McGrew: You are going to notice it because it is going to stick out. There was a sense for a long time that the best way to get people's attention was the oversized postcard. I do not know about your mailbox, but mine is - right now for election season  - full of letter-size postcards because they are big. So they stand out. The problem is, when you get like 13 of them in one day, they really do not stand out. You are looking for something else if you are going to try and get my attention. 
    • [00:08:23] Ryan McAbee: I am curious, is either one of those examples - because we talked about it on another module - where it is a self-envelope?
    • [00:08:29] Pat McGrew: These are not; these are actually real envelopes. But that same technique does work with self-envelope processes. So it is fun. Now I have two here that might be a little bit hard to tell, and I am going to put my finger very strategically, so I will not tell you what they are.
    • [00:08:48] Ryan McAbee: You put it closer to you.
    • [00:08:50] Pat McGrew: It works better. Yeah. Okay. So do that, and then we are going to do that. 
    • [00:08:58] Ryan McAbee: Are you pointing at the technique? 
    • [00:08:59] Pat McGrew: No, I am really not. And I think it might be hard to see on the video, but… 
    • [00:09:03] Ryan McAbee: I see that they are coated. At least that piece is coated. 
    • [00:09:05] Pat McGrew: You got it! Actually, these are both coated by a company called Kompac, and the interesting thing about coating is that it comes in a lot of different forms. These are soft touch coated so that one of these…
    • [00:09:17] Ryan McAbee: So that tactile feel when you touch it. 
    • [00:09:19] Pat McGrew: It feels different. This one was printed by Xeikon. This one was printed by HP, but they were both coated by the same company called Kompac. And so it is one of those things where you have a lot of choices about not only how it looks, but how it feels when you touch it. And so it is one of those things that you really want to talk to clients about to try and work on the kinds of look and feel that they are really trying to get to.
    • A lot of the manufacturers of devices have really cool sample kits. So this one is from my friends at Harris & Bruno, H&B. And so what they have done is they have created some kits that actually show images with all kinds of different things, right on one card so you can see. So it can be glossy, matte, or high gloss on different kinds of substrates.
    • You can feel the difference between something that has been coated and something that has not been coated, something that has been glossy coated versus matte coated. That is part of our embellishment story. And for designers, very often, no one tells you that these are options. So one of the things that a lot of the digital press manufacturers are doing is they are partnering with companies.
    • Harris & Bruno is certainly one to really promote this idea of matte and silk and gloss coats and high gloss shiny coats so that you can up the game on the pieces that you are producing. Especially since a lot of the digital presses these days can go to very high high-weight cardstocks. It really makes a difference.
    • All these same techniques are available for analog printing. You might use the same equipment; Harris & Bruno have been supporting analog print for decades. But you may have other people's equipment. Epic does it there. There are a lot of companies that do it. If you have coding equipment in your shop, find out what it is, and who the manufacturer is; go to their website and see their application pages because it might give you some ideas of things that you could also be selling.
    • [00:11:16] Ryan McAbee: It is worth mentioning that with most of the offset press manufacturers, you can do coatings if you have the extra unit in the physical printing press.
    • [00:11:23] Pat McGrew: Yeah. And that is a very popular way to do it. 
    • Okay, so this one you are really going to love. We will start with this one.
    • So can you see this guy? 
    • [00:11:31] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. That is the foiling type technique. 
    • [00:11:34] Pat McGrew: Yeah. This is pretty. So this is actually a deck of playing cards in this box, and I have not opened them. You are watching the official unboxing, but there you go. So the box was printed on a single-pass device called a Kodak Ascend.
    • And then that work was done in such a way that it was put through a foiling machine. The information it needed to place the foil in these precise lines was already embedded in the file, so it knew exactly where to put it. The fineness of the lines is what really was remarkable to me.
    • It is just really beautiful. And then they printed the cards on one of their other digital devices - on their Nexfinity device. Playing cards. They did not embellish the cards. 
    • [00:12:20] Ryan McAbee: I think the box shows a good example.
    • Because when you get into these embellishment techniques, you can often do it on substrates that are not white. It is not just white paper, and it gets that other pop that the visual kind of impact. 
    • [00:12:33] Pat McGrew: This was dark on one side, white on the other side. And the substrate just pops at you when you see it.
    • Then I want you to think about something like what is going on here. 
    • [00:12:49] Ryan McAbee: It is either going to be something like braille or an embossing/debossing. 
    • [00:12:52] Pat McGrew: It is embossing. This is definitely embossing.   
    • [00:12:55] Ryan McAbee: Maybe angle it a little.
    • [00:12:56] Pat McGrew: I think it is just going to be a little bit hard.
    • But then you have something like that. Can you see it? 
    • [00:13:03] Ryan McAbee: What is that? I can see it, but I am not quite sure what I am looking at. 
    • [00:13:05] Pat McGrew: It is absolutely foiling. But in this context, it is foiled in the center of something that is debossed. 
    • [00:13:12] Ryan McAbee: Oh, wow. 
    • [00:13:13] Pat McGrew: So there are multiple textures.
    • These are different, and if you were doing luxury perfume boxes or you were doing marketing collateral to support luxury watches, or cosmetics, we see it a lot. But this is another really interesting use of foiling, where you are calling out a letter. There are processes that will let you lay the foil down on any type. 
    • [00:13:34] Ryan McAbee: I feel like that is almost coming back around. There used to be a technique that you found in business cards years ago.
    • Thermography. And I feel like this is a different take on that kind of thing that is coming back around.
    • [00:13:45] Pat McGrew: It is, and then this was one of my favorite pieces.
    • This is all texture, as well as being foiled.
    • [00:13:52] Ryan McAbee: And different foils, too.
    • [00:13:54] Pat McGrew: It is different. It has multiple foils. And the nice thing is this is a sample book where they have actually explained how they did it. 
    • [00:14:00] Ryan McAbee: Oh, wow. 
    • [00:14:01] Pat McGrew: And what went into the process. So many of the vendors that these solutions typically have some pretty cool handbooks that can help you out.
    • They also will give you ideas. So Ryan, can you read this? 
    • [00:14:15] Ryan McAbee: Scuff, soft, and deco. 
    • [00:14:16] Pat McGrew: So, this book actually has examples of each one, so you can run your fingers over and get a sense of how they behave. 
    • [00:14:25] Ryan McAbee: And those are just coatings, I am guessing, or varnishes? 
    • [00:14:27] Pat McGrew: These are coatings and varnishes.
    • Now let me show you. They produced another one. This is a company called Skandor. This one is my favorite. I know a lot of teams are doing this now - they are making playing cards for their team members, 
    • [00:14:44] Ryan McAbee: They are trading cards almost.
    • [00:14:45] Pat McGrew: And these are all embossed differently. So they have different foil dots, and they have different called-out kinds of processes. So I think these are the kinds of things that, when you look at them, you really start to get an understanding of how it works. This one is also - this is your cyan, magenta, and yellow.
    • But it is actually all digitally enhanced or embossed and enhanced with some spot varnishing. You also have specialist things like silver. This one is a sleek gloss, and then there is a silver iridescent solution here that they are providing. Would you not love the sparkliness of that?
    • [00:15:24] Ryan McAbee: Definitely stands out. 
    • [00:15:24] Pat McGrew: So I think when you come down to it, companies do a lot of really cool things. One of my longtime favorite companies in this space is Scodix. And this is Scodix. What they are known for is their green poly fluid process that is all recyclable.
    • So, it looks really amazingly like foil, and it has texture, and it feels like you should not be able to recycle it and you can. And they do a great job of printing on dark substrates.  
    • [00:15:49] Ryan McAbee: And that is a digital process. 
    • [00:15:51] Pat McGrew: This is a digital process, and of course, they tell a sustainability story on their sample, so you know that it is really glossy and pretty and shiny, but you can still recycle it.
    • So those kinds of things help. There is a group of people who came out of a company called MGI in France that also does this kind of embellishment. 
    • The company is called Taktiful, and this is a piece that they put together to talk about all the things you can do to embellish. It is an organization that is devoted to educating about embellishment in the space.
    • But they walked the talk, Ryan. They did exactly what you would hope they would do. They created a very highly embellished piece to show all the things that they recommend you can do as revenue enhancers around embellishment. 
    • [00:16:34] Ryan McAbee: Very nice. And so just the organization to promote is called Taktiful. 
    • [00:16:38] Pat McGrew: Yes. Taktiful. 
    • [00:16:41] Ryan McAbee: And then the company that printed it was MGI.
    • [00:16:44] Pat McGrew: MGI. This particular one was done on MGI equipment, but the techniques are valid for any of these things that we have talked about. And remember that we tend to think of it as just being a gloss or a shine, but you can get some pretty amazing techniques.
    • There are all sorts of ways to create different kinds of textures and looks. Hologram images. You will see it on the Iridesse and on the Revoria. You will see things that look like - not just glitter, but holograms. Just because of how they are laying the toner down for you to look at.
    • There are all sorts of things that can look different, from an advertising perspective. There is texture here, and there is shine here. These are the kinds of things that a lot of designers do not know they can do and are available to them. And there is money to be made in embellishment.
    • The folks from Taktiful will tell you that you can sometimes make half again, what you would normally make on a piece by adding embellishment to it.

50- trimming and cutting

This review covers the different types of cutting devices on the market today and the distinction between cutting and trimming.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to Finishing 101; talking a little bit about cutting today. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting. Of course, this is Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. So, Pat, I know you probably have had fun with some cutters in your day. What different types of equipment, types of cutting do we have in this industry?
    • [00:00:19] Pat McGrew: The first thing to remember is the cutters - things that cut substrate - come in all sizes and shapes, right? I have operated manual ones in my lifetime. I have operated drill press-looking things as well as the push-button sort of automated ones. And typically, this is a converting process.
    • We are taking whatever we printed, and we are getting it into the form that we need for final delivery. Cutting may be only part of the process. It may be that we cut it once, and we are done for things like posters or maybe brochures. But very often, cutting requires multiple cuts to create a final product. It may require complex cuts, which is where we get into die-cutting and motion cutters. They come in all sizes and shapes. They come in all price ranges, and they are generally designed for specific purposes. So you do not typically buy a laser motion cutter if all you need to do is make one cut across a poster. But if you are doing business cards on giant sheets, laser cutters can be really useful. 
    • [00:01:32] Ryan McAbee: A couple of things on the point you made about the range of equipment. Let's say guillotine cutters as an example. That is basically a huge blade, very sharp. You do not ever want to have your digits near those. There are safety systems in any that have been manufactured for the last 20 years ago to prevent that. They have laser sensors to prevent that. The reason that you see one pictured here is almost a tabletop version versus the very huge automated one below it is that every type of print establishment has to cut at some point.
    • A small in-plant that may be only a little bit bigger than your living room in terms of floor space. It can have a tabletop cutter. Whereas the biggest production printers out there can have bigger, more robust automated systems. At the end of the day, you are still making your cuts to your final trim, as we call it. And we will get into the difference between cutting and trimming. That is the reason we see the diversity here. 
    • The other kind of interesting thing is that we have seen a little bit of an evolution of different use cases, too. When we say die cutter, we almost instantly - or at least I do - think of packaging, because you are taking folding carton boxes, and you have this die which is a metal frame to cut with. You are punching that box out, and then the rest of the material - the matrix as it is called - is going away. I have seen people gravitate to high-efficiency business card production using that instead of a guillotine cutter because it is just faster. 
    • [00:02:59] Pat McGrew: It is. The thing about die-cutting is there is a bit of an expense, right? It is something that printers are always very careful about when they are going to make investments. To use a die cutter, you have to make the die, and you are making a metal die. Specialist organizations make them. It is a very specific kind of specification that you have to develop for the die that you want to be made. Different machines can hold dies in different sizes. Some die-cutting machines can hold combinations of dies. So you can get different kinds of cuts from modular dies, whereas others require a single die to be installed and used for cutting.
    • There are some variations, but all of those dies cost money, and they do wear out. They do not last forever. The dies that you use most often, you may be replacing every two to three years. But it is part of the cost that has to go into your quoting and estimating process because dies are not free.
    • [00:03:58] Ryan McAbee: You also have to figure out what to do with them when they are not in the machine. You need a place to store them, and also catalog them so that you know which one is for what purpose. Because, as you said, the die is specific to an application. It is not something that you are going to change on the fly like you can with a guillotine cutter or these other ones that we see here - the rotaries and the lasers.
    • In terms of rotary cutters, I mostly associate that with sign production and wide format production these days. But it has more than that use as well, right? 
    • [00:04:27] Pat McGrew: The thing about a rotary cutter is that it is basically going to run a wheel across the substrate to make the cut. They come in different width wheels, so if you are trying to get through a pretty heavy industrial substrate, you might get a certain style of wheel, or a certain type of cutting edge can be different on the wheel. Some of them are beveled, and some of them are needle-sharp for different use cases. 
    • I also see them mostly in sign shops, but I have also seen them in use in low-end business card shops. I have seen franchise operations and smaller print shops where they use a rotary cutter because the cost to buy one is less than a die cutter. They can be a little bit more versatile and easier to operate - and maybe a little less scary than a guillotine cutter in some cases. You often see them being used for things the inventors did not intend them for. 
    • [00:05:27] Ryan McAbee: Then one, like we have pictured here, that is a tabletop version with the multiple arms and gantry that you can use to cut unique shapes. 
    • With a guillotine cutter, you are talking about a straight edge.
    • With a die-cutter, you can get into some shapes. You can do rounding corners and things of this nature. With these rotary cutters, you can do more.
    • [00:05:45] Pat McGrew: That larger table is programmatic, right? You can build template programs that will cause the cutter to move in different directions and move on angles based on what it is you are trying to do. At a lot of print trade shows, you will see these in operation, cutting out a box or cutting out a guitar. They can be very tightly manipulated to create very small cuts, to create very intricate pieces. If you were doing that every day, you might be looking over at that laser cutter option instead. 
    • [00:06:21] Ryan McAbee: To close out the rotary cutters here - the heads of those can take different tools. You could even have a tool for creasing or a tool for perforating and all different sorts of multipurpose kinds of things. With the laser cutters, you are not changing out tools, but it can still do the dynamic cuts and shapes, as we have said.
    • [00:06:38] Pat McGrew: Yeah, the laser cutter can be programmed to do perforations, to do cut-on-path, which is a popular use for them. When we start talking about things like laser cutters and programmable rotary cutters, remember there is going to be a bit of computer expertise involved in setting them up, building those template programs, operating them, and maintaining them.
    • [00:07:02] Ryan McAbee: One of the primary use cases I have seen for the laser cutters is more in the packaging realm. Would you say that is a fair statement? 
    • [00:07:09] Pat McGrew: We see it a lot, although I have seen some used for greeting cards - where you are looking for intricate cuts to create see-through greeting cards.
    • [00:07:19] Ryan McAbee: Like some of the pop-up ones and so forth. 
    • [00:07:20] Pat McGrew: The pop-up ones. The ones that almost look like latticework. I have seen them used for that. Definitely seen a lot of folding carton and corrugated packaging applications. Sometimes posters that are two layers where one layer has cutouts,  and the back layer is a second sheet that has maybe a foil or a hologram image, and they are actually bonded together.
    • I have seen a lot of different uses for them.
    • [00:07:45] Ryan McAbee: Moving on to cutting versus trimming. The way I have always thought about it is that cutting was a precursor to the finishing trim that is needed. One thing that commercial printers do is they may receive oversized material or sheets, right? They are pre-cutting that to the size that they need to actually run inside of the press. 
    • The thing that I always think about with the trimming is - let's say that you are making a folded brochure. You are going to need a three-sided trim after it has been folded and stitched to create a clean cut on those three sides. 
    • How do you view these terms? 
    • [00:08:19] Pat McGrew: The first print shop I ever worked in was an old shop that had been around from the 1700s, so they had some really entertaining equipment. The way it was explained to me, cut versus trim, was to think of it as rough cut, fine trim.
    • Your cutting is when you are getting your basic shape and your basic size established. Your trimming is your last step before you are creating the final product to ensure that you are getting the exact specified size that the buyer wanted. 
    • [00:08:49] Ryan McAbee: That is a good way to remember it. It is in the wording there. That is brilliant. Hope that you have a better understanding of all the different kinds of equipment and their use cases for cutting and trimming. Also, the little cheat sheet on how to remember what we were talking about with cut versus trim.
    • We hope that you join us on a future episode at The Print University.

51- mailing

An overview covering the different finishing processes and requirements related to mail preparation and lodging with the postal systems.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello again, and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. Of course, as always, it is Ryan and Pat coming to you. Today Pat, we are talking about finishing operations, but specifically for mailing. Think about everything that shows up in your mailbox. There are a lot of variations in terms of what comes into your mailbox and all sorts of different kinds of finishing techniques that are applied, right?
    • [00:00:21] Pat McGrew: There are. When we think about the reason we carve out mail finishing, it is that there is a lot of different equipment involved that is very specific to preparing things to go into the mail stream. There are design elements. We have another module on designing for mailing. It is important to understand that this is regulated right 
    • [00:00:38] Ryan McAbee: There are rules to the game.
    • [00:00:40] Pat McGrew: There are definitely rules depending on where you live. If you live in the US, the USPS controls those rules. If you are in Canada, Canada Post controls the rules. Every country has its own national postal system that controls the rules. It gets a little bit more complex if you are going to be mailing out of your country. Then there is another set of rules that you need to follow. 
    • For print and mailers in the direct mail space and in the transaction space where most print and mail companies operate, many of them do mail out of the country because they are serving constituents that might be living elsewhere, either permanently or temporarily. They have to be aware. 
    • Creating mail is a combination of a lot of technologies, but it is also knowing the rules and becoming the expert in what can be mailed where, and what allowable formats there are. It is a fun kind of place in the print industry. If you think about it, not every printing company is a mailing company.
    • This is such a complex area that sometimes printers will decide to contract that final step of actually getting it prepared for mail and into the mail stream to another company. They want to focus on the printing aspects that they are very good at. They would rather pay someone to take that last step into the mainstream. And that is not a bad decision.
    • [00:01:49] Ryan McAbee: Let's go through a couple of these finishing techniques. Many of these are familiar from other kinds of finishing and the different parts of printing that we have talked about in other modules. 
    • We have cutting, perforating or perf for short, and trimming. All of those really are getting it into the format size that it needs to be final. If we have a perforation, often I think about it for remittance forms. Either it is a credit card or bank statement where they want you to tear it off and send it back with a payment. It may be a donation kind of thing if it is a nonprofit where they want you to tear that piece off and enter your donation amount and send it back in the mail return envelope. 
    • Folding, obviously. You are probably not going to send out a full-size letter.
    • [00:02:21] Pat McGrew: Although you do see it. This is where knowing the mailing rules makes a difference. It is cheaper to mail something in what we think of as a business envelope than in a big flat envelope, a letter size, or a legal size envelope. Sometimes because of the number of pages involved, it makes more sense to mail it as what we call a flat. There is equipment that is very smart, and in a print run, it can identify the beginning and end of a job as it is heading into finishing. If it can be folded and inserted into a business envelope at the correct weight - because each page has weight, and there is a limit to how much weight you can put in the envelope for specific mailing bands. If it has too many pages, it will be diverted off and inserted into one of the larger flat envelopes and handled instead. 
    • [00:03:05] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, that all makes complete sense because you have physical characteristics where it cannot be too thick from the rules and regulations side.
    • Inserting, we know, is getting those pages into the envelopes, whether it is a flat or traditional business-size envelope to go out.
    • [00:03:18] Pat McGrew: Sometimes it is not just those pages that just were printed, but it may also have other pieces that get added into the envelope during that inserting process. Those pieces that are inserted might be preprinted.  They might be litho printed, or they might be digitally printed, but they are printed. Stacks are loaded into the inserting equipment. Again, based on information that is carried with the job, it knows which to put in which envelope, and it might be one insert or might be two.
    • It can be a really complex set of algorithms because it can be based on weight. Maybe my statement has one page, but your statement has four pages. I might get four inserts, but you might get no inserts because it would take it over the weight limit. This is why mailing is a complex finishing operation.
    • [00:04:02] Ryan McAbee: It is always fascinating to watch the equipment physically run too. In terms of sealing, I am assuming that we are talking about closing up the carrier or the envelope so the content will not fall out. But what about coding and franking? Those are interesting terms. 
    • [00:04:14] Pat McGrew: Yeah. A couple of things we need to do with a piece of mail. I will come back to this one in a minute, but there is a line of data-looking things across the bottom here. And that is the coding, and it is an IMB barcode. It is an Intelligent Mail Barcode. The whole idea is that once the piece is ready to go into the mail stream, it gets an encoding put on it. That makes it easier for the rest of the mailing system to be able to track and trace that piece of mail all the way to delivery to your mailbox. It is a complex operation because it needs to know the ZIP code, the ZIP plus four actually in the US. It needs to be able to understand international postal codes as well, which are not the American ZIP plus four for the most part. The coding part is going to help that mail piece get where it needs to go. 
    • The franking piece is actually how we pay for that post postage to be managed for each envelope. Again, I will come back to this piece, and it has this sort of interesting thing here. It is not a stamp, right? It is a pre-printed piece that actually includes the license for the mailer - each piece of mail, each mail set that is produced. Say I am going to do a mass mailing, I can get a bulk mail certificate, and that certificate number would become part of that printing on the outside of the envelope.
    • That can happen in a couple of ways. It can be pre-printed on the envelopes that are used, or it can be printed in line with the coding that we are adding. A company might have multiple bulk mail permits because it is going out for different kinds of organizations. Some for the marketing organization, some for the security organization. They might have different permits, so there are a lot of ways it can be handled. 
    • It is also possible to put stamps on this stuff. So there are machines built to literally put one of those cute forever stamps on each piece as it goes by. There are a lot of different ways to get the postage there, but one way or the other, you have to get it on there, or it is not going anywhere.
    • [00:06:07] Ryan McAbee: That is right. So sorting can happen in multiple stages, right? We are talking about sorting to route things more efficiently and then sorting to eventually get it into the right mail routes and stops that it physically gets delivered in, correct?
    • [00:06:20] Pat McGrew: Sorting is one of those places where organizations can actually save money that they can keep or pass on to their clients, depending on how they are structured. Sorting is something that the postal service asks its biggest mailers to partner with so that they do not have to bear the brunt of all of it. You get a discount if you sort by the first two numbers of the ZIP code. There is a discount available. If you go out to the full five, you get a better discount. If you go out to the carrier routing, which is that plus four numbers. If you are looking at my ZIP code 80011, that tells you that I am on the eastern side of Denver, Colorado, and that is going to go to that major facility that handles our ZIP code. If you go down to the last four numbers on my ZIP code, it actually is the carrier route. It tells the systems that are reading all the coding exactly where to sort mine so that it gets to the person who delivers my mail to my physical address;  it is ready to go, and it saves the post office a lot of time and effort.
    • Now, if you are sending a letter to grandma, you are probably not putting all that coding and marking, and you are certainly not sorting it, which means that there are mailing machines at the postal service facilities that have to be able to read all that and mingle the sorted pieces with the unsorted pieces so that I get all my mail. 
    • [00:07:41] Ryan McAbee: If you do some sorting upfront prior to delivering to the postal service, you still have to transfer your records to them to know what they are picking up and then so forth. 
    • [00:07:48] Pat McGrew: Yeah, you cannot just show up with a bunch of stuff. There is a tremendous amount of electronic communication between big mailers and the postal service. The postal service knows before it gets there that a truck is coming loaded with certain types of mail destined for certain places, and that helps keep the mail moving most efficiently.
    • [00:08:09] Ryan McAbee: That is the major process, but how do the prepping and the finishing come into play? I think we covered most of this, in terms of the ZIP code and the breakdown of the ZIP codes and how that gets sorted. But anything else to really call out? 
    • [00:08:21] Pat McGrew: There is something called file-based processing, and owners of equipment made by Pitney Bowes and people who follow that methodology have something called an MRDF file. It is the Mail Data File that rides along with a bulk mailing, and it contains a lot of information that is then lodged with the post office to help them do things. The other thing that happens in file-based processing is that instead of printing in a customer alphabetical order, they actually print in ZIP code order that is presorted before it is ever printed. It is the most efficient way to do print mail. 
    • However, not everybody is there. We have been working on this for 15 years in our industry. We are just not all there yet. There is still a lot of physical sorting that has to happen, and that is what all this equipment that you see in the picture helps with. Getting things sorted, and inserted in the right order. It is a big, complex operation.
    • You mentioned sealing the envelope. Sealing, you think it should be pretty easy, right? You know the envelope, you seal it, and you go. It can be a pretty complex operation because if you are doing direct mail pieces that need to be folded in half, they need a little wafer tab on the bottom. That is the regulation. Envelopes actually have to be sealed to be inserted in the mail stream. You have  to have those processes in play to make sure that they are sealed correctly. If things are not sealed correctly, the problem is that the mailing equipment then can be jammed. If the flap is up, if the flap is open, you can actually shut the whole mail line down because something is caught. Paper is caught unraveling in one of these machines. One of these processes, when they are going at very high speed because of a flap that was stuck up, does not make you popular at all.
    • There is sorting that happens everywhere. There are machines that do the bulk of this sorting everywhere. Over time we see it becoming more and more automated, but that does not mean the price of postage will go down. 
    • [00:10:12] Ryan McAbee: Just to recap, if you could do me a favor. I know on this screen we have the word co-mingled, but there are two common terms in the mail arena - the prepping and the sorting - and that is co-mingling, but also maybe householding, if you could just run us through those two.
    • [00:10:24] Pat McGrew: Co-mingling is something that happens during the sorting process. Not all the time. It is when you have five or six bank accounts with the same banking institution. One of the things that an organization can choose to do is to co-mingle multiple packages into a single envelope for different household members. It can be different household members, or it can be you as the owner of five different accounts. It is taking several different mail streams and focusing them into a single envelope destined for a single address. 
    • A lot of companies do not do it. They do not do it because they are worried about my household, where I have multiple family members living here. They might not appreciate me getting their mail in my envelope even though we live in the same home. A lot of companies do it and focus only on a single person. The technology is such that you can commingle a whole lot of different streams into a single envelope and get better use of the envelope that way, if that makes sense. 
    • Householding is a variation on the theme. It is where you are literally taking pieces from multiple print streams that might come from different organizations and focusing them into an envelope. Sometimes you will see this with nonprofit organizations that will team up with partners so that they can afford to do a mailing.
    • You might get a mailing solicitation from the local parent-teacher association, as well as the local school board, as well as maybe boy scouts and girl guides or whatever. The way we use householding is to focus diverse streams into a single envelope and co-mingling we are taking streams within a certain brand, let's call it, and focusing it into a single envelope.
    • There are cost savings, but there are risks. There is risk management that has to be done before you decide to go down those paths. 
    • [00:12:05] Ryan McAbee: It is probably fair to say, based on the descriptions, that co-mingling is probably far more used than householding. Just because householding requires an extra kind of cooperation between the two input brands. 
    • [00:12:15] Pat McGrew: Yeah. 
    • [00:12:15] Ryan McAbee: So it is time for show and tell.
    • [00:12:21] Pat McGrew: I am going to start with the flattest thing I could find in all of my stuff. And so think about postcards, right? We have all been getting a lot of these during election season, but to be honest, we may be getting them all year long. In this case, I have my favorite. This has become a really popular format.
    • It is a giant, full letter-size postcard. Postcards come in all sizes and shapes, but in order to be mailed, you have two choices. One is that you can do something called Every Door Direct Mail, where the only thing you have to supply is the card because at the post office, you tell them what ZIP code you want it to go to.
    • They make sure it gets there, so it does not even need an address. Now, in this case, this one actually has my address on it. And it has gone through a process where the information, the address information was put on, and in fact, this one even has one of those cute little QR codes on it.
    • That lets you go and get more information. So this is like the plainest, simplest thing you can do. You print it, you get the address on it - or you do not if you are doing Every Door Direct Mail - and it goes into a mailing bucket, and it gets lodged with the post office, and off it goes, no big deal.
    • [00:13:33] Ryan McAbee: And for Every Door Direct Mail - or EDDM is the acronym, though because we love acronyms - I think of it as the easy button to reach a specific geographic area. 
    • [00:13:42] Pat McGrew: Yeah, this is the way I see it used. Say you are opening your new nail salon or your new barbershop, and you know that you are most likely to serve people who are very local.
    • So you figure out what ZIP codes work for you. Where do you think you are going to draw the bulk of your people from? You launch an EDDM campaign into that space, announcing your grand opening, and your monthly specials. And for many companies, especially small shops, this is a really effective way to get in on the power of direct mail without feeling like you have to be a data genius in order to figure it all out. 
    • [00:14:16] Ryan McAbee: Makes perfect sense. Great. So what else do you have for us? 
    • [00:14:18] Pat McGrew: A step up from the giant postcard is the foldover piece, right? And so this one is, again, another election. This is Colorado ballot measure 124. By the way, this one lost. But it has a really nice piece that was mailed out, and it is big - but this one had to have a wafer on the end because it was put into the mail stream just like it is. It is literally this eight-inch wide by 22-inch long piece that was folded in half.
    • And then it had a wafer on the end that I had to break open in order to be able to read it. And it has a mailing space right here. And that is the bulk mail permit up here for the mailing. This is a really common format, and the machines we use for this are too. It was printed. It was folded, and then it was passed through a wafer machine in order to send it off into the mail stream. In this case, this was actually digitally printed, and I can tell that for all sorts of interesting reasons, but not the least of which is that all the mailing information is actually part of the piece.
    • You can tell it was not sprayed on separately, which is something that you often see - something printed litho, or offset, and then the address information is sprayed on afterward as part of the mailing process.  
    • Now, another thing that often comes is things that look like newspapers. So this is a newspaper, and this is a newspaper that was sent out. This was actually from Belgium. This is a personalized newspaper that is being used by one of the print organizations in Belgium to invite their members to an event. But again, this is the kind of thing that in Europe, it actually has to go into an envelope of some kind. It cannot be mailed on its own. But here in the US, we allow you to mail these - they have that tab on there. Now, in this case, it would have to have the tab here. And because it is more than one sheet, it would have to have tabs on both sides as well. So this is a fun format. It is a newspaper format. We all think newspapers are dead, but they just keep coming back in strange new ways and strange new use cases. 
    • So now let's get to things that are, again, like things that are probably in your mailbox. We all get catalogs. You should see that most catalogs you receive have those wafer tabs, keeping them from opening during the mailing.
    • And then, they come in different sizes. So it might be a full Sears catalog, kind of thing. But, things like this are really common as well, and this is a multi-page thing. This is actually for me from United, and it is letting me know all the things I could cash my miles in for - because I might want a Solo or an air fryer, or perhaps I desperately need the Citizens watch. But the thing about this is that, again, it is printed. It has all the mailing information. It has a bulk mail permit and was wafer tabbed when it came to me. Tabbed here, tabbed on both sides. Sometimes if it is something like this that is making offers and it is only one sheet, they actually put a little line of glue instead of doing the wafer tab. They will put a little line of glue down it that you just pop open, and it is not the kind of glue that you know will rip your fingernails off trying to open it. It is just a very light touch of glue. And this is why in the mailing universe, we become experts at different kinds of adhesives.
    • Because we learn what kind of wafer tabs work for what number of pages and what kinds of substrates. And we learned about different glue lines because our suppliers can bring us all levels of adhesiveness in these processes. And that is always good to know so that you can help your customers make the best decision.
    • Remember that any place that you are going to put a wafer tab or you are going to put a glue line - you would want to make sure that you are not putting it on top of the logo. You want to make sure that you are keeping no man's land areas available. 
    • Some of these catalogs also have tear-out pieces, right? So they use that perf line, and they are made so that the tear-off is actually like a business reply card that already has its own postage information on it and gets mailed back with your order. Most people will go online these days to place their orders, but there are still a lot of people who fill out those cards and mail them back.
    • [00:18:15] Ryan McAbee: I noticed the variation, Pat. Is that the kind of size and sheet count that you just had on that example? Those tend to work really well for either smaller companies that have fewer products that they want to promote or more of a niche. They are a specialized area.
    • But I have also gotten a tremendous amount of what we have considered traditional catalogs right now, because, of course, it is leading into the holiday season. You tend to see it seasonally. 
    • [00:18:36] Pat McGrew: Yeah, and they come in all sizes now. A catalog can be literally one sheet folded over with a lot of products listed and how to buy them.
    • It can be four pages, eight pages, 16 pages, always multiples of four. And they come in all sizes because technology has democratized our ability to get this kind of printing done. EDDM makes it easy for us to get them out to potential customers that we do not currently have a relationship with. We see a lot more companies, even internet-born and raised companies moving to catalogs. And so there is a lot of mailing that is going on in that catalog space. Even Amazon mails out catalog. Which is fun. I have several. I have a toy catalog and a book catalog that just came in.
    • Alright, so this is like what we traditionally think of as mail, right? This is your envelope. It is a #10 envelope. It was sealed here, and I have not even opened it yet, as you can tell. So this is one of these cases where the postage was printed during the process. The inside pieces of paper were stuffed into the envelope, and then the envelope went through the process of having this put on, sealed, franked, and then inserted into the mail stream.
    • One of the things that is interesting about this particular envelope and it is going to be hard to read, but right here it says that this envelope is only capable of six pages maximum. This envelope you may not put seven pages into. So you need to think about that. And so that is something that you will see happen.
    • If we take this out of the envelope, we will use this, and it is, in fact, only four pages. So we met the minimum, it is not six pages, and this is all digital. So this is from the State of Colorado, where I live, and this is for one of my other businesses. You will see that every one of the pages has one of these little teeny tiny barcodes on it. And that is to help identify the beginning of the job - the beginning of my mail piece and the end of my mail piece - during the mailing and inserting, so it went through the process. It was printed, and it was chopped up. I happened to know what equipment this was printed on, and then it was folded up. And it was stuffed - all in an automated way - put in the envelope, sealed, and entered into the mail stream.
    • But this is not the only way that we can mail. There is another kind of mailer that you will see, and you probably get these. These are the single pieces, and these are created on very specialized kind of equipment that are designed to create a single piece that is both the content and the wrapper, and it has perforations down both sides and across the top.
    • I am terrible at these things. I forget to do a tab. So typically, the way these work is that you tear an end off, and then you tear the top off. And then, on the inside, you have information. So I am not going to show you what the information is because it is actually the pin code to my new debit card.
    • But basically, it is multiple pieces. And then, on the inside, it is a lot of stuff to shield it from being read from the outside. So when you see things like envelopes that have a lot of print, what looks like printing on the inside, that is to keep anyone from being able to read what is inside the envelope.
    • These things do this as well. Now, the thing about these is that they are often done for checks and PIN numbers. Sometimes it is just regulatory information, and proxy notifications. It is an easy way to avoid an envelope. And one of the reasons companies like these is that we are currently in an envelope crisis in North America, actually worldwide, and it has to do with some of the challenges of the paper supply chain.
    • Remember that this is all paper. In order to make an envelope, you have to have access to a lot of paper. So if you can create this using substantially less paper to get it out for a lot of applications, this is a really good way to do it. Do not forget that there are also things that come in envelopes that make them a little bit more challenging. Remember, I just said that was my pin number.
    • This is the carrier that has my card on it. We have talked in the past about things being tipped on. So part of the inserting process for things like credit cards and debit cards can involve another piece of equipment that tips a plastic card or maybe a discount card onto a piece. And that is where you have to be a mailing expert because you worry about the weight of the card in addition to the weight of the paper going into the envelope to make sure that your postage is correct. Because if you get the postage wrong, the USPS returns it to you.
    • They will not take a bulk mailing if they have determined that you have not calculated the postage correctly. 
    • [00:23:18] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, and the tip on pieces, they usually have that glue backing, like you were talking about with the glue strip.
    • [00:23:24] Pat McGrew: But it adds weight, and it adds some complexity to the inserting and getting ready for the mail process. And that is why there are companies that specialize in mailing processes - because this is a lot of machinery, it is a lot of chemicals, it is a lot of stuff that you have to keep track of in order to make sure that the mail that you are trying to get into, the mail stream actually gets there and gets to the intended destination.
    • [00:23:45] Ryan McAbee: Thank you so much. You are the print sample guru and, in this case, the mail sample guru. You get a lot more variety than I do at my house. So thanks for sharing. We hope you enjoyed it and will watch us here on the future episode at The Print University.

52- binding methods

A visual overview exploring the different methods for binding paper, from saddle-stitch to spiral bound, and everything in between.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Print University here. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and of course, we have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. Pat, we are talking about the different types of finishing that we call binding. What does that actually mean? I see some books coming out here - it looks like perfect bound books.
    • [00:00:17] Pat McGrew: It is basically how we put sheets together. If you think about it, there are an awful lot of things that we print. Sometimes we just need the flat sheets. Sometimes we are just folding something in half and putting a wafer seal on it, and sending it out to the mail stream.
    • A lot of printing - books, catalogs, user manuals - the kinds of things that cause us to want to hold things together. There are just a ton of ways that you might do that. With books, we often do perfect binding or sewn binding. Catalogs - sometimes they are staple bound in the middle. We have spiral binds. We have screw binds. We have all kinds of binding. It is basically holding together a whole bunch of content that we want to remain together. 
    • [00:01:02] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, and stay with us because we are going to do a show-and-tell with some examples of different binding techniques. Think about it in the reverse, too. Think about how difficult it would be to read a novel or a book if it was not bound individual sheets.
    • Talk about getting it out of order, not being able to put a bookmark to know where you are, all these kinds of things. Just the usability of it would just not be there without binding. 
    • [00:01:22] Pat McGrew: Exactly. That is why we have three-ring binders for a lot of the things we use for educational purposes or even for pitchbooks.
    • Keeping sheets together in the order that they belong is what makes pages of stuff turn into usable content, and that is the role binding plays. 
    • [00:01:37] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. I could not agree more, so let's talk about some of these popular binding techniques. I would say saddle stitch or stitching or stapling - it is all basically the same thing. It is probably one of the most common ways to keep pages together. Think about it - most of your magazine content usually has the two staples, maybe more, that are along the spine or where it folds in the middle, right?
    • [00:01:58] Pat McGrew: And it is easy. 
    • [00:01:59] Ryan McAbee: It is easy. You can do it with a lot of different equipment. Some of it can be an inline finished booklet by the end as it comes out of your digital printer with the finished equipment attached to it. It is easy to do, but there are some limitations here, particularly around the fact that you can only go to so many pages and so much thickness.
    • There is a ratio there. If you do not pay attention, it just becomes too thick, and it starts to creep out, as it is called. You will end up trimming off content, so there are some limitations. 
    • [00:02:25] Pat McGrew: Whenever we talk about binding, one of the things we always have to remember is that how ever we are going to bind it, we have to make sure that the content is set up for that bind.
    • When you look at that picture, where we have four sheets stuffed together - You put a couple of staples in, and you are fine. But let's say that you are trying to staple 50 sheets, right? Now, as you look at it, the information about how much bind you have in the middle versus how much you have when you open the first page -, you will not be able to read it. As you mentioned, if you are trying to trim it, you will wind up trimming things off the end just to make it look like a nice book.
    • There are calculators that are online and in an awful lot of web-to-print solutions. Your imposition software can help you with this, to help you make the best decision for how many pages is the limit for using staples.
    • Now, remember, staples come in different sizes. Just because they come in different sizes does not mean that it is always the best solution just because you have access to them. It is one of those things where you really want to think about the user experience. When, and how will they use this thing that you are binding for them?
    • So staple is easy. It can be done manually, it can be done automatically, but sometimes it is worth going to some other technique to create a better user experience for reading whatever it is you are binding. 
    • [00:03:39] Ryan McAbee: There is also the longevity, durability conversation, right? The three that we have listed here are the ones that you would use if you do not need a really long shelf life. If you want to print a coffee table book, you would not want to bind it in this way because it is not going to last very long.
    • A couple of others that we have here. The comb binding and spiral bound are very similar in that you are going to collate or collect those sheets.
    • You are probably going to put a back, a front, and a backer on it. Usually, there may be clear fronts and solid backer sheets. Then you are going to punch through those to create different patterns, usually along the spine there like you see where the comb is going to go. Then you would usually take a machine - it could be a manual type one that you do a few of them at a time, or it could be built into your digital printer and finishing equipment. You are going to put that comb or wrap that comb that has teeth into those holes that you punched out. 
    • Similarly, with spiral bind - it is basically the same process, except instead of the teeth that you are going to open, it is going to wind and wind it in. That is why it is rotating there. But all of these hold your pages together, and all three are different binding techniques.
    • I would just say that these lend themselves to material that you do not want to last the test of time. 
    • [00:04:43] Pat McGrew: Exactly. 
    • [00:04:45] Ryan McAbee: These are some that you will find that are perfect bound. Perfect binding is very common in a lot of books. A lot of the things you will see on the bookshelf at the bookstore, right? 
    • [00:04:56] Pat McGrew: Traditionally, perfect binding comes in a couple of flavors. Say we have a hundred-page book. What we want to do is create what are called folios - groups of pages that are printed in such a way that the margins look the same as you are going through. Now I might collect maybe 20 sets of folios into my book, and then I may staple bind those folios, or I might sew them. They might be sewn together. Once you stack them, you use glue to hold them all together and put the cover or the case on it so that it is bound. 
    • If you look at something like this, right? This is more or less perfect bound. This was done a little bit differently because this was actually designed to lay flat. It has just a little bit more processing involved to allow it to lay flat. In most books, what you will find is that you will have something that looks like this. This is a case where all the pieces are sewn together. And when I open it, I want to make sure that if I have pictures that are supposed to line up, I want to make sure that I have imposed it so that is going to happen. When it is all done, a cover will get wrapped around this, glued on, and away it goes. 
    • There are probably 20 different styles of perfect binding that you can use. Sometimes they only ever glue things. They never staple or sew. Sometimes they sew all the individual pieces and then sew again, and then they glue. There are a lot of different varieties. It depends on the equipment that is available, and the nature of what is being done. That longevity question comes up, too, because things that are casebound - are intended to be durable and used long-term. You tend to use more intense perfect binding methods than you would use for, say, a mass-market paperback that you buy at the airport.
    • And I have had pages fall out of those. 
    • [00:06:48] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, absolutely. Those are the ones that just are typically glued along. The other thing from a design perspective, you are talking about the crossover images, and you have to pay more attention to the processing and the printing, and the finishing to get those to line up accurately when they span across the page. 
    • The other thing that we have introduced here with perfect binding that we did not have in the first three binding methods is now you have the spine, which is probably large enough in many cases to also print on as well. The cover as it wraps around. 
    • There are always different design considerations depending on the binding method that you need. We have two others here that are tape and padding. Tape is literally taking those folded sheets again, and you are using tape on the exterior to hold them together.
    • Usually, they are also stitched because that is what holds the different pages together before it has the tape to give them a little bit more strength. 
    • [00:07:34] Pat McGrew: And sometimes they are glued too. It depends on how slick they are for the tape binding. 
    • [00:07:39] Ryan McAbee: We will show you an example of that. Again, you are not going to be doing a tremendous number of pages in a tape-binding method. It usually lends itself to fewer pages.
    • Padding can be anything. It is usually pages that have been cut or are die cut, and then they are glued along one of the edges. Then you can tear it off.
    • You see an example here, like a receipt book. Post-it notes are a very visible example.
    • That everyone can relate to when it comes to padding. 
    • We have a few more techniques here that are probably more durable than the other methods that we talked about.
    • You already mentioned having different folios, signatures sewn. 
    • [00:08:12] Pat McGrew: When you are sewing each signature - there are a bunch of folios here - each one of the folios is sewn. And then, the group is sewn together, and then glue is applied to the outside of it.
    • Sewn-bound books, again, tend to be for more durable uses. This happened to be done for travel. It is a travel book, so something where people are going to be opening and closing a lot, lends themselves to being sewn bound. Books that are bound for, specifically, for library purposes. Directories and things like that are very often sewn.
    • [00:08:40] Ryan McAbee: I was going to say, too, the sewn binding method is usually the precursor to the final binding. You do not see just sewn signatures on their own. They are always going into either a perfect bound wrapper or the casebound wrapper that we are getting to.
    • [00:08:51] Pat McGrew: Yeah. We will show it in a minute, but I actually have the piece that wraps around it so that you can see how it looks when it is done. 
    • [00:08:58] Ryan McAbee: Casebound, we typically think of as hardback books, right? 
    • [00:09:01] Pat McGrew: Typically, we call them case bound because the cover itself is usually cardboard. It can be different thicknesses of cardboard, and it is in pieces. It might be covered in heavier paper stock, but it is what forms the cover that goes around the bound book - what they call the book block. 
    • [00:09:17] Ryan McAbee: If it is case bound, if it is not directly printed, the exterior of the case binding part has a wrapper. You would have a dust jacket, as it is called.
    • [00:09:24] Pat McGrew: Sometimes both. Sometimes there is just an embossing of the book title and maybe the author. Then a dust jacket that wraps around the whole thing that is more graphically rich. 
    • [00:09:34] Ryan McAbee: The one on the right here, the screw binding. That one I always think of more for technical manuals for some reason. That is what I think of when I have seen this in the past. But what are some other examples? 
    • [00:09:43] Pat McGrew: You often see it for sample books. If you have somewhere in your universe a Pantone swatch book, right? It is the thing that kind of fans out. That is screw bound because you want to be able to see each leaf separately. You see a lot of them with a single screw where you can fan through a whole lot of different examples. 
    • They are very common in sample books, and a lot of times, you will see screw-down manuals when books need to be technical manuals. Machine manuals and things where the vendor might issue an update on maintenance procedures or new features that have come in. In order to get it into the shop manual, the one that is actually on the floor near the machine, you unscrew it. You put the new leaves in, maybe take some old leaves out if there have been updates, and screw it all back together. It makes it a durable binding, but one that permits updating. And that's one of the values of screw bind. 
    • [00:10:32] Ryan McAbee: Very good points there. The fact that you can update it. You could update if it was in a three-ring binder, but this screw bind method is usually a bit more durable. 
    • [00:10:39] Pat McGrew: Have you ever seen a three-ring binder open itself? It happens, and then the pages go everywhere. Whereas with the screw binding, that is simply not likely to happen. That is just a much more durable way of providing that same kind of functionality. 
    • [00:10:51] Ryan McAbee: That leads us to a little bit of show and tell.
    • Okay, so can you see this, Pat? 
    • [00:10:57] Pat McGrew: Yeah. I like your Santa.
    • [00:10:58] Ryan McAbee: Right. It is one of those pad printing examples because you can take it off. It's basically a post-it note here. So it is all glued together. 
    • [00:11:06] Pat McGrew: I have one too. Mine is this, and so it is the same idea. It will just tear off. This is a post-it note  - a printed post-it note, which we see a lot of now - customized post-it notes - that are done that way. So you see it for labels now. During the holiday season, you will see pads of labels put together. So it is a really handy finishing tool. 
    • [00:11:26] Ryan McAbee: Let's go to the most common one that we started off with, which is basically saddle stitching.
    • So you can have something like this. So this is only 12 pages or so. It has two staples, one here, one here on the edge, and it keeps everything nice. It is a little brochure. And then, on that first round, we talked about a comb bind, right? So you can see that.
    • Great. So it has a clear kind of sheet as the cover. And then the dark backer. Then it has these teeth that open up for all the edge That is punched here. 
    • [00:11:54] Pat McGrew: And so, in some ways, that does allow you to update it in the same way we talked about. It is possible to get the combs out and get them back in, but it is never pleasant.
    • [00:12:03] Ryan McAbee: It can be reusable in that way. It is just a slow process, But it is possible. 
    • The other one that we have here is a perfect bind, but this perfect bound book actually is just cut and glued. So it is one of the less durable parts. I do not know if you can see that here.
    • [00:12:17] Pat McGrew: So basically, the sheets are cut, they are slathered with glue, and then the binding is wrapped around.
    • [00:12:22] Ryan McAbee: That is right. And it does not lay flat, either. Like your example, really, right? 
    • [00:12:26] Pat McGrew: Yeah. Because mine will lay flat. And this is a very specific style of binding. It can be used for booklets. It can be used for all sorts of things. This happens to be an equipment manual just showing samples of how different equipment can behave.
    • This is actually from a company called Imaging Solutions, but they sell these for photo books. Because for photo books, you do not want to lose the picture in the bind. So this allows you to print the entire page and still have it visible, which is cool. 
    • [00:12:56] Ryan McAbee: That was very smart. So another example I have here is more of a spiral bound.
    • You can see how it still gets punched, but it is a spiral that basically goes in to connect the sheets. This one also has tabs as an example. That is very common when you do spiral bound. And then one of the more unique ones that we did not have a great example of, but it still shows what tape binding looks like.
    • This is just a composition book that you find in schools - the school kids use a lot that just has a writing paper inside of it, but literally, it is stitched here. So it has staples along this, but you cannot see it because the tape covers it up on the binding side of it. So those are some of the examples of binding techniques. I think we showed most that we covered.
    • [00:13:30] Pat McGrew: I think it might be worth showing the sewn one again. And so let me just show this. So basically, these are all sewn. 
    • So this is all sewn, and this is done. This is a company called Mechano Tecnica that does this, so it is all sewn. So now you can see all the stitching here that I have just ripped apart. And, then, when this becomes an actual book, a jacket is put around it. In this case, it is a soft cover jacket, and it folds in here, and in the real world, this piece would all be glued and put in the final book. Which is fun. But typically, you will see these  - they are called sewn book machines, and companies that buy these are typically building much more durable books.
    • You will see a lot of companies that specialize in binding for libraries or rebinding for repairing books. You will see companies that will take a book apart, literally slice it all apart and resew it back together. So it has some interesting uses. But, and then, of course, we did talk about the screw bind, and I will just, again, show that is the kind of thing that you do with that.
    • All good stuff. 
    • [00:14:57] Ryan McAbee: So that is a great mix of examples of the different ways you can bind things together. I would also encourage everyone to go look at our other finishing courses because these kinds of finishing techniques can often be done with digital equipment that is either inline, nearline, or offline. Or you can do it in more analog kinds of finishing techniques as well that are strictly offline.
    • [00:15:16] Pat McGrew: Just more mechanical. 
    • [00:15:17] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. More mechanical. So definitely go check out those other episodes. We thank you for joining us here to explain the different binding techniques, and hope to see you at a future episode at The Print University.

53- converting

An introduction to the different converting processes used in packaging applications with a show-and-tell at the end.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am with Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting. Together, we are The Print University, and we are today talking about converting. Converting is a very specific term of art in our industry. It refers to turning paper or plastics into other things.
    • Taking sheets and giving them dimension. Doing things to them that make them purpose-specific. The picture you are looking at here is of a converting process that involves making corrugated board into boxes. That is not the only thing that converting means. It means a bunch of other different processes that might not look like they have a whole lot of relationship one to the other.
    • [00:00:49] Ryan McAbee: They do. It is not just boxes; it is a whole list of finalized products, or things that you can put other products into that are converted. Think about envelopes that get into your mailbox. You can think about all the boxes, secondary packaging, and primary packaging - we explained the difference in other modules. Basically, secondary packaging holds something within it that also probably has primary packaging. So secondary packages, like that Kraft paper-looking box; it is a brown box that shows up at your door. Whereas primary packaging often can have printing. Of course, these days, that line is blurring.
    • [00:01:23] Pat McGrew: Think about an Amazon box, right? The Amazon box that lands on your doorstep, which today might be advertising Lord of the Rings and has a lot of printing on it as well.
    • But then that is your secondary packaging because what is inside the box typically also has its own packaging. 
    • [00:01:39] Ryan McAbee: That is right, and folding carton often acts as primary packaging - like your cereal box is a typical example. Corrugated, which we saw on the video - that is where you have multiple liners or paper, and then in the middle, you get the fluting which has different characteristics to it for strength and crush resistance to protect in shipping. Then, of course, to get any of these products made, there are some common processes to converting. 
    • Usually, you are involved in cutting. That could either be with a rotary type blade; it could be with a die-cut kind of application that you would see often with folding carton. You could be creasing and folding.
    • Maybe it is worth pointing out here, from your point of view, Pat, the difference between a crease versus a fold because they are similar in a way. 
    • [00:02:20] Pat McGrew: Yeah, and sometimes it is the same equipment that can do one or the other or both. We crease things when we are trying to make it easy to fold, but we are not quite ready to do the folding yet. If you think about the process of making a box, whether it is a folding carton box or it is a corrugated box, when you get it, very likely, you will notice indentations. That is how you know where you should fold. Those creases are done by kissing the box material so that when it is time to do that fold, it does it cleanly.
    • We have talked in other episodes about the grain of paper, the directional grain of paper, and one of the things creasing can do is help break the grain to make it easier to make the fold without it getting all bumpy and not looking very refined. Folding is really the act of bending the paper or bending whatever substrate you are using - vinyl or plastic. Creating a permanent bend in it in order to form a package in the case of most of the converting processes. 
    • [00:03:28] Ryan McAbee: In addition to the grain of the paper, you always have to take into consideration if you are printing where that fold or that crease is going to be. It may crack the ink depending on what kind of ink type you are using, or it may also make it, from the design perspective, not ideal for reading and placement. 
    • [00:03:45] Pat McGrew: Yeah, we talk about dielines when we talk about converting. Dielines are a specialized format that you can add to your creative design program that helps you identify while you are doing the design where the creases and the folds are going to be. Also, where glue might be and where flaps might be cut out, where pieces might be cut out in order to form the package because not all things are square. There are some really interesting, complex uses of corrugated and folding carton where it turns into octagons and almost looks round when it is done. Having a dieline template as part of your design helps you avoid doing silly things like putting the logo in the bend of the box. 
    • [00:04:32] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, it is the marks layer with the dieline and so forth. It is always usually a part of the design file where you can toggle it with the actual content or artwork to see where that relative positioning is to make sure that it is going to look right.
    • In the packaging world these days, there are also three-dimensional tools that will take that 2D design and then visually make it into the 3D. You can look at a model and turn it around and make sure it all looks okay too. 
    • [00:04:56] Pat McGrew: Sometimes, in these web-to-pack organizations, they will include those kinds of tools so that you can see them before you order them.
    • It is a very important part of the design process when you are working with anything that will be converted. 
    • [00:05:08] Ryan McAbee: Web-to-pack, from a terminology perspective, would you define that as usually an online ordering process where you can right order custom box sizes and maybe even designs?
    • [00:05:21] Pat McGrew: Sometimes you will work with an organization that has a bunch of pre-templated packaging options for you. Standard box sizes, standard pouch sizes, all sorts of things, and standard materials that they use.
    • There are a lot of organizations out there that will give you access to online tools for you to design a custom box, and then they will give you a price back on it to do short-run customized boxes as well. 
    • [00:05:44] Ryan McAbee: We have converting that takes place. We said a lot of these shared similarities that the actual technical execution looks different because it is a different product in the end.
    • A setup to convert envelopes is going to look different than the setup to make folding carting, corrugated, and flex packaging because they all have their unique processes associated with them. Generally speaking, it is going to require some kind of fitting or cutting, or to create the final shape is going to require some kind of fold creasing converting so that a 2D flat object can then become a 3D shape.
    • Then there are unique characteristics that you are aiming toward the customer because, in a case of a folding carton, they want it to have some visual pop to it. If it is in a retail environment, it should stand out from the competition. But they also want it to have the structural integrity to actually hold the product and withstand whatever use it is going to get. 
    • [00:06:36] Pat McGrew: You have to know what is going on in the package. That becomes absolutely essential before you open up a design program. Know what it is you are actually going to have to hold. Typically corrugated secondary packaging boxes are rated by the weight that they can hold and the thickness of the corrugation. How the flutes are managed between the two sheets that make up the box. That has to do with how much weight they can hold. If you are shipping a coffee maker, it has a certain weight associated with it. If you are shipping gym weights, it is a slightly different story, so you would want to make sure you had the right box for the right purpose. 
    • Even in folding carton, holding lightweight rice crispies is a different ballgame than perhaps a box full of marbles or pellets, right? Kitty litter weighs more if it is sand based. Some of the synthetic stuff does not weigh as much, but you make decisions about your packaging based on what will actually go into that primary. 
    • [00:07:37] Ryan McAbee: There are a lot of considerations even beyond weight. You have anything that is going to be a food product or something that is going to be ingested - you have all that food safety consideration. 
    • One area that stands out for me is in flexible packaging because often you need multiple layers of film, which get bonded, and that gives you not only the structural integrity of a pouch, but it also provides a barrier for things to get into that content 
    • [00:08:01] Pat McGrew: Yeah. You are looking for things for moisture protection. Some pouches hold liquid, and some hold dry material. You still have to be food safe - and remember that in a very strange way, converting is somewhat regulated. You cannot just start up a corrugation machine in your garage and go into the packaging building business. Be a little tough to do. The reason it is regulated is that the weight that goes into the box has to be regulated because those boxes are being transported on common carriers, which are also regulated by the weights of which they can carry.
    • When it comes to anything that touches food or chemicals. Any kind of industrial chemicals, all of your over-the-counter medicines, all of that stuff, is regulated. The packaging they go into is regulated, and that is where your barriers have to be food safe; all of that is regulated and has to be certified. There are all sorts of regulations that the people who manufacture these packaging types are aware of and have to manage. 
    • [00:09:02] Ryan McAbee: Two other reasons you are probably not going to have this as a startup in your garage. Number one, the physical size of this equipment can be quite large. Second - the capital expenditure investment required in much of this equipment can be quite large too. 
    • [00:09:15] Pat McGrew: It absolutely can be. 
    • [00:09:17] Ryan McAbee: It is my favorite time in this series of finishing and converting. Let's take a look at some of the samples that you have gathered for us today, Pat. 
    • [00:09:26] Pat McGrew: I want to start with something that is at the most basic level, pretty plain, and it is literally just a piece of corrugated.
    • So this is a fairly thin corrugation. I want to thank my friends at The Box Maker. They created what I think is one of my favorite print samples around corrugation right now. It is literally a set of corrugated tarot cards where they give you ideas. All the different ways you can use corrugated boxes and displays, and packaging.
    • But this is a piece that they have corrugated, and then they have made some die cuts so that they fit into their box. And these are printed on both sides. Today most corrugated production is done for secondary packaging. It is that brown kraft box, sometimes a white kraft box, very often with maybe a label slapped on it to show what the product is.
    • There is a piece of the market that is growing is digitally printed corrugated - where the sheets that make up one side or the other side are both actually pre-printed. With, sometimes, very rich graphics and then go into the corrugating machines for the creation of the boxes.
    • We see it interestingly in grocery store applications for fruit boxes and melon boxes, where the farmer's information is actually on the outside to show farm-to-table. There is also another popular process of creating sheets of corrugated in different thicknesses and different weights, and then printing them after their corrugated sheets, in the same way that you would print offset printed sheets.
    • And then after they are printed, they are converted into boxes and displays and all sorts of interesting things. So this is a fun thing. That is what a corrugated piece is. 
    • [00:11:26] Ryan McAbee: Question on that corrugated piece. Obviously, it is a pretty thin flute, but they had multiple die cuts on that because the inside pieces look to be different than the holder, which had a different die cut.
    • [00:11:34] Pat McGrew: Right. So this is the box that it all comes in. And, you can see me through there. It is very complex because it then opens out, and it has all these printed cards.
    • [00:11:51] Ryan McAbee: On both sides. Again, the box. 
    • [00:11:52] Pat McGrew: Yeah. Everything is printed on both sides. It is really a fun piece. And what I loved is they actually built this for their salespeople to be able to take out and show potential customers the power of being able to print on both sides of corrugated converted packaging, which is just fun.
    • So that is corrugated, and we think of corrugated in a lot of different ways. So if you are building a box, it is an interesting process because, remember, we talked about dielines and all the things you had to be careful of. So this folds up into something that looks like this.
    • [00:12:32] Ryan McAbee: Pat, for the explanation here, maybe show us what is considered a flat, what is considered a crease. 
    • [00:12:38] Pat McGrew: So here is your flap, right? And that is a flap. See that right there? That was a crease right before I actually took the time to fold it into the box. That was a crease.
    • And then all of these cutouts, you will see that this is not just a straight slit. There is actually empty space in there because you need that in order to be able to manipulate it, right? So the dielines have to be very carefully set, and the designs have to be carefully set so that you do not wind up with important information where you are going to be cutting it out, right?
    • So this particular piece is from a company called Mercantile Press, and they do a lot of pharma work, right? They also work in a highly regulated area, so they can print as a post process where they can print the sheet or they can put a label on it. But in the end, this is actually pretty strong. This is a pretty interestingly thick piece for transporting pharmaceuticals, right? Where you do not want them crushed. So there is this concept in converting of creating crush-proof boxes, and that is where you will see some interesting use of corrugated technology to create very tight fluting to make sure that if somebody would actually accidentally step on the box, what was inside the box did not get crushed.
    • [00:14:15] Ryan McAbee: I think what is interesting about this example, too, is that it has different liner boards. So one looks to be white on the outside and the kraft is on the inside. And then it may be that it is a label applied. 
    • [00:14:30] Pat McGrew: In this case, it is really interesting. This is a label that has been applied to one entire panel.
    • So the label is one entire panel, and I could tear it off, right? But yes, you are right. This is white liner paper on the outside and craft liner paper on the inside. 
    • [00:14:50] Ryan McAbee: We are probably going to move on to the folding carton example next, but they share some similarities here with the flaps.
    • I want to point out that flaps often do not have any printing on them because they are hidden when the product is actually converted into its final shape. However, there are often some control marks for colors or batch numbers to quality control are often hidden on the flaps. So if you open up a cereal box, one of those flaps probably has some of that detail on it.
    • [00:15:17] Pat McGrew: Yeah, and I am just trying to put this all back together, so I do not know if you can see what I am doing here. So these flaps are tucking in, and they have little notches on them that notch into the slot that is on the inside. And so now we have this, and this folds in here. That is my label with all my marketing information.
    • And this is my label with my address information on it. This is a great example because it is small enough that I can actually show it on the screen. But every box works this way. Every corrugated box works this way. It has flaps, and it has creases, and it gets folded. In some cases, this might, instead of being tucked inside, it might have a glue line here and actually be affixed to the outside, right? So that is your basic info on corrugated, right? 
    • So let's talk about folding carton for a second. So I have one - this is a little one. This is a little folding carton box. This is from the same folks, my friends at MPI. It is a card stock, right?
    • Anybody who can print postcards can do some kind of folding carton because if you look at this, the sheet that it is encompassed by, is not very big. So I am going to do something that I hate doing with my print samples, but I am actually going to break this one apart so that you can see the sheet.
    • It was very well glued, so it contains some material on the inside. And so this is the folding carton, right? This is the card stock. It has flaps. It is printed on the outside. This one does not happen to be printed on the inside. You can see the creases, which then become folds when it is actually assembled.
    • And in this case, this was built as a sample to show people who do pharmaceuticals and dyes and chemicals that are in smaller bottles. This could also be used to send spices and things like that. Also very popular for anything small perfume bottles - they fit in this. I have seen that done with folding carton, as well. 
    • This one actually had a tipped-on label, so you can see this flaps. And again, that was just done to show as a sample of something that they could do. Nice color. In this case, they did not put those registration marks and the other control marks on the inside for the sample, but they certainly could have.
    • [00:18:03] Ryan McAbee: I think to point out the design aspect, everything has to work together.  You do not want to have a nice design behind where the tip-on is because you are never going to see it. And the same thing applies to corrugated and folding carton. The fact that it has to be glued on one side or at least in some portion of it. And so you want to allow in the design that you know it is going to have that glue area that is basically unusable.
    • [00:18:29] Pat McGrew: Yeah, so this is another one of my favorite folding carton examples because it is your basic Milk Bone box. This was actually printed as part of a Milk Bone campaign. You could go onto the website and order doggy treats with a picture of your dog on it. 
    • So this is one of our dogs, and this one, again, you can see the creases. So it is a kraft on the inside. And then it is fully printed on the outside. This happens to be digitally printed, which is not the norm but is becoming popular for things like this, for specialized campaigns. And I am not going to break this one apart, but this one, the glue line is right here. And so if you run your finger over it, you can feel it.
    • But this one has all the product markings. So the thing that you have to remember when you are designing these things is, if you are doing anything that contains any kind of food or any kind of chemical. In fact, in most industries these days, there are probably barcodes, SKUs, and other kinds of markings that are required.
    • You need to know where those have to go and make sure that they are positioned so they can be read by scanners. That becomes very important. And you also want to think about the colors and, if you knock out white on black or white on dark card, if you make it too small, it is not readable.
    • Putting, black on red is a little interesting. But Ryan, here are your control marks on this one. So they are in the bottom right here. All the ingredients are actually printed down the side. And it is just a really nice example of a folding carton.
    • If I broke this open, you can see, if I flatten it like this. is not a big sheet, right? This actually prints this way. So it is about a foot wide and a total length. This way is about 20 inches long by 12 inches wide when it is opened out flat.
    • And again, a lot of presses can handle these things. This one is a 24-point stock, but it is something to be aware of. And the folding and creasing and cutting processes are simply not that hard to deal with, but they do take specialized equipment that you would need to be thinking of if you were doing this. So folding carton is fun, but some of my favorite stuff are pouches. 
    • Pouches are fun. So this is one I just got yesterday. This is from a company called Unreal. And this is one that definitely has a food-safe barrier on the inside because it contains food.
    • In this case, it is quinoa balls, covered in dark chocolate. So this is one you can tell is for dogs. So these are Calming Ora Sticks. We have lots of dogs. This is one of those pouches. And so what I did here is cut it. If you look carefully here, you can see where the zip lock is - right where the two pieces of plastic are. So there is an assembly process involved here, right?
    • So there is a big sheet of the material, and it is getting bonded through the food-safe material that is now on the inside. Once that process happens, you have these long sheets that have the outer part and the inner part, right? So now this is being printed on, getting all the food information for the doggies' calming sticks, and then it has to be cut into what will be the final width.
    • And then these pieces that form the zip are actually melted into the fabric to become part of the pouch, and that is what allows them to seal. So once those are there, then the final seals are done around all four edges. And so this one, actually, has a sort of a flappy bottom, so it is a little bit more complex than just a straight, U-seal.
    • This one has a little bit more complexity to it, but the machines that do this are set up by size. And so very often today you will see organizations that specialize in short-run, run dozens of different brands, one after the other through their finishing equipment for pouches because they are all the common size.
    • And once the fabric is printed that is used, and I  am calling it a fabric - this happens to be plastic. That is what makes it possible for them to do a lot of short-run jobs very efficiently. So this particular converting process is easy. Now, the interesting thing is to think about juice packs, right? If you have kids, you probably have the ones that you stick the straws in, but they are also really popular for liquid chemicals in all sorts of applications where there is a spout that gets put in here, and that is a very automated, but manual process in that they have to make it after they have the pouch formed, they have a hole that is cut. And then a machine comes, and in the same way that the zipper is melted in here, the spout is melted in and made part of the stem. And they can be different kinds of complexities. There is an episode of Print Sample TV on Inkish.TV. A company called Houp.com, h-o-u-p.com, and they do it in the UK. They use digital printing equipment to create the pouches so they can do really short runs. And they do it with a really nice UV printing style. They can do metallics and stuff, and they have mastered the ability to get the spouts in there so that you can pour things out.
    • So there is a lot of flexibility in converting this, but there are a lot of complex processes involved. You have to design how the pouch is actually going to be finally formulated and delivered for the stuff to be put in it. Remember, it gets made, stuff gets put in, and then that last seal gets put in place.
    • [00:24:37] Ryan McAbee: This has grown in popularity over recent years because we have found processes to make it efficiently, but also because from a consumer aspect, you have the convenience of resealable pouches. Or it keeps it fresher, and it keeps it more contained. All these kinds of convenience features for the consumer. But also from the company itself, often you can fit into the same secondary package more flexible package products. 
    • [00:25:02] Pat McGrew: It is shelf friendly. 
    • [00:25:04] Ryan McAbee: It is shelf friendly. Absolutely.
    • [00:25:05] Pat McGrew: It is shipping and shelf friendly. Yeah. And that really does make a huge difference. And we are talking a lot about sustainability and making processes more efficient, and I think that is where flexible pouches really shine.
    • We talked about folding carton - pretty much any equipment that can print, and cardstock can create a folding carton setup and make it work. There are some low-end finishing devices that make that easy to get into if you have a market that you can serve. Flex packs are a little trickier because the finishing equipment required to convert the material into the pouch and do it in a safe way so that the material can be transported is all a little bit more complex than you would probably do in your garage. 
    • [00:25:45] Ryan McAbee: It is a little more specialized. I know you were using fabric in its general sense of the term, but here we are usually talking about the acronym soup of plastic. So you have everything from polyethylene to high-density polyethylene to PVC or polyvinyl chloride.
    • [00:25:58] Pat McGrew: Oh yeah. There is all sorts of stuff. And now we're actually seeing a lot of flexible packaging being done with paper-based substrates. Again, sustainability is very important in a lot of areas of print and paper-based pouches that are still food-safe barrier material on the inside.
    • And then, finished in pretty much the same ways, are becoming more and more popular. 
    • [00:26:22] Ryan McAbee: All good points. Thank you again. 
    • [00:26:24] Pat McGrew: I got one more thing, though. 
    • [00:26:25] Ryan McAbee: Oh, that is right. We have envelopes. 
    • [00:26:27] Pat McGrew: We have envelopes, and we mentioned that envelopes are part of converting. And in our mailing episode, we talked a lot about envelopes.
    • But what I want to point out is these are all envelopes that showed up at my house in the recent period. No two are the same size, and they are all business envelopes. They are from my banks and my credit cards. 
    • So when this is a sheet. It is a pretty good size. This one is 11 inches wide, and it is long enough to do the wrap and the flap. So specialized equipment makes envelopes. There are a lot of small envelope makers, as well as some giant envelope converters, right?
    • They do them in all sizes. We are looking at what we think of as business envelopes, but think about all the greeting cards that you buy in the store that have the reds and the greens, and they are very colorful. All of those have to be converted as well because every one of those envelopes started as a flat sheet.
    • So those converting processes are, you know, it is a function of cutting out the flap and getting rid of the waste, folding it, using some sort of glue to seal it and go. Also, think about packaging envelopes. Amazon uses those plastic envelopes these days. You can do Priority Mail envelopes that are board stock folded into an envelope format or the pouches that have the sort of bubble wrap stuff on the inside. Every one of them is a complex converting process that is purpose-built for the requirements of the envelope that it is intended to produce. So it is a complex set of processes, but it is all really interesting and worth knowing about.
    • [00:28:12] Ryan McAbee: Thanks again, as always, for having all those samples at the ready. We hope you learned a lot about the different converting processes across not only the packaging world, but also with envelopes, which we often do not think of as converting, but it is absolutely a conversion process. And we hope to see you here at a future episode at The Print University.

54- finishing for wide format

A look at the major finishing techniques used in sign and wide format printing operations, including laminating, mounting, cutting, stitching, and welding.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, this is Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am, as always, with Ryan McAbee of Pixel Dot Consulting. Today we are going to talk about wide-format finishing. It is a fun space because it is not like any of the others, is it Ryan? We are talking about bigger things as a rule, different kinds of substrates, and you do a lot of different things in order to make these now product-ready, installation-ready.
    • [00:00:28] Ryan McAbee: All finishing is getting the product into a state that can be used for whatever its intended purposes. When you go into wide-format, there is such a diverse use case among all these different products because you can go from a poster that is going to be inside of a store all the way out to these huge multi-meter wide things that are going to be in a billboard that you are going to view from hundreds of yards or half a mile away as you are going 70 miles an hour down the interstate. Because of that, you have a lot of different types of finishing based on what environment it is going to be in and how it is going to need to be mounted or hung, or installed, right? 
    • [00:01:09] Pat McGrew: Yeah, absolutely. Think about just what you know about signs that you see everyday. Some of them are rigid. Some of them are on vinyl. Some of them are on glass. Some of them are on metal.
    • Sign technology has changed a lot over the years; the things that we print on today, the substrates we print on today, are a little bit different. Today we might print on something that requires a specialized process to turn it into something we can actually use out in the wild. 
    • We have four of them here. We have got laminating, mounting, cutting, stitching, and welding. Each one of those might be applied to a single piece, or you might only need one or two of these different things.
    • What are we doing when we are laminating? 
    • [00:01:51] Ryan McAbee: When you are laminating, you are basically applying a film to either one or both sides of the product. It is really using a plastic-type material, and it is using heat and pressure to basically seal it. If you want to think of it that way. It is really to give additional barriers to the paper or the original substrate that was used so that it can stand up to UV rays of light. If it is going more outdoors, or in an environment where it is going to take a lot of abuse from touching and so forth, it gives different characteristics to make it more resilient so that the product lasts.
    • [00:02:24] Pat McGrew: So if we are laminating, we are basically trying to make it more durable for the purposes that we have designed. What are the differences in mounting? Do we have to mount it? 
    • [00:02:33] Ryan McAbee: You do not have to  - you could simply just hang it. That would be including grommets or those little circular holes that you can attach things to. 
    • But from a mounting perspective, you do not have to mount it. If you do, there are many different types. You could attach it to some kind of physical structure. You could just use adhesive and put it onto some kind of foam core board that gives it more rigidity so that it is not just paper that is flopping over from the print. We will get into a little bit more of that.
    • [00:02:59] Pat McGrew: I guess you could just put adhesive on the back and attach it to a wall. We see that in sports stadiums, in those kinds of venues where you just put it on the wall, and it is temporary. It is not meant to be there forever.
    • [00:03:11] Ryan McAbee: Is it going to be something that gets taken down because it is a temporary kind of event that is happening? At a trade show, you will see those pop-up banners - that is mounting in a way. It is just using a physical structure to be able to do that. You can easily collapse it and take it on. Many different kinds of ways to do this. 
    • [00:03:28] Pat McGrew: Now we can cut it, and sometimes we just need to get a straight edge. Sometimes we might need to actually form-fit it to a piece of foam core or some other thing that we are mounting it to. 
    • [00:03:40] Ryan McAbee: Either you are going to be doing a straight edge cut, or you are going to be doing some kind of contour cutting because it is a unique shape that you are trying to produce.
    • That influences the type of cutter or cutting machine or equipment that you will need to do it with. On some wide-format inkjet printers, that may go up to 64 inches or so, you can actually have the cutter built as part of a process on the machine. It literally prints and starts the contour cutting. For things like labels and those kinds of applications, you can do it inline. Other times you will take the printing materials, and you will put it onto a big flatbed cutter, and it will do the contour kind of cutting as well. There is also rotary cutting, and laser cutting; we talked about a lot of these in our cutting course, so you can go back and look at some of that. This is applied more specifically to wide format. The difference here is that you are probably not going to have a cutting process up front necessarily, and then also have a trimming process as the final kind of cutting like you do in some of the more paper-based printing. You are going to do it more toward the end of the process as a finishing piece instead of more upfront to use it. 
    • There are exceptions because you could be cutting down board from an oversized board sheet into smaller sheets to save on material costs or whatever you are trying to do. 
    • [00:04:47] Pat McGrew: The two weird ones are stitching and welding because they honestly do not sound like they belong in our industry. 
    • [00:04:53] Ryan McAbee: More like crafting.
    • [00:04:55] Pat McGrew: Yeah, they do. It is like scrapbooking. What we are really doing is either adding gussets or places we can pass a poll through or actually taking two pieces and making them one by literally welding them together. They use the term welding, and you are heating it up so that multiple pieces, multiple sheets, become a single long sheet. A lot of the big oversized kinds of signs and billboards can be done that way.
    • [00:05:21] Ryan McAbee: I like to think of it as more like fusing the material together. Even though the term welding is what we use because when you think welding, you often think you are working with metal and big gas and, all that kinda stuff. 
    • [00:05:30] Pat McGrew: Yeah. Because we are really not adding anything else in. With welding, you are adding another material in to get them to join. Here we are actually just using heat. Just using heat can be sometimes very high heat in order to get the materials to fuse together and become a single entity. 
    • [00:05:46] Ryan McAbee: In both these cases, you are either doing it to put it onto a mount of some sort, like you said, with a gusset for the pole to insert through. Or you are doing it because you want to create a more durable or cleaner look to the finished edge so it does not fray or whatever else that it might do when it is out in the environment where it is supposed to be put.
    • [00:06:05] Pat McGrew: In the wild. So what does it look like? 
    • [00:06:08] Ryan McAbee: When it comes to laminating, these are just a couple of examples of machines. These are not too wide in their format size. It is taking the roll of material, the laminate source itself, and applying it on top or on both sides of the material that you want to have laminated. It is using pressure and heat again to make it into one single piece at the end or put a coating on top if you want to think of it that way. 
    • [00:06:29] Pat McGrew: Can I throw a curveball at you on this one? So laminating is literally putting another sheet on top that is adding that durability. In some of the other episodes, we talked about things like coating. Is there a situation where we might just coat it instead of going through the lamination process? 
    • [00:06:48] Ryan McAbee: You could. You could coat anything, really. But we tend to think about coating as part of an operation on paper-based materials where you are adding durability because it needs to go into the mail stream and not get dinged up.
    • Laminate seals the product in a way. It does resist environmental properties because you can coat on both sides in a paper-based product, but often it is only applied to one side. It does not create a barrier around the actual substrate or paper in many cases to prevent the elements from getting into. Laminating does create a complete seal if you do both sides. 
    • [00:07:22] Pat McGrew: Okay. Makes sense. 
    • [00:07:23] Ryan McAbee: Laminating is very common, especially if you are going to do any kind of signage that is going to be outdoors in any way or at least exposed to direct sunlight because it can provide that UV resistance. You have all seen it before if you walk by a sign that has been up for a while - the reds and the yellows are usually the first to go. They usually just wash out versus the rest of it. That will help give more durability, which will allow the product to last longer in whatever environment.
    • Mounting. Pat, there are many different ways you can basically put a wide-format print of whatever material into the final environment that it is going to live in. Up at the top left, we see trade show graphics that are hanging from the ceiling that could be a fabric that is being wrapped around the frame. Because it is very easy to then collapse and ship it to the next destination versus vinyl, which has that heavy kind of weight. 
    • [00:08:15] Pat McGrew: Yeah, it is heavier.
    • [00:08:16] Ryan McAbee: But we have more examples as well. 
    • [00:08:17] Pat McGrew: A lot of these examples either came from shows I was attending or from some folks at GAM who are wide-format specialists on the East Coast. What happens when you start looking at wide-format, it is hard for us to hold them up. It is hard for us to hold up a billboard, hence the pictures. 
    • At the bottom left, that is a vehicle wrap. It is on a trailer, but it is a vehicle wrap. Typically vehicle wraps, whether it is a train, a bus, a car, or a trailer, are printed on wide-format devices. Printed on specialized material that is very lightweight, very often, it is very porous. A lot of them are stretchy, and they are typically finished with heat in order to get all the wrinkles out of them and make them really smooth.
    • They can be really effective. When you just walk up to them, they are usually really brilliant and vivid and really attractive, which is why a lot of people look at them for trade purposes. That is why a lot of buses and trains use them.
    • Most recently, we have seen the people who sell hardware - printers - actually use vehicle wraps on big digital inkjet devices, which is a lot of fun. We were recently at the State of Colorado, and they had vehicle-wrapped their press so that it has the state of Colorado seal on it and mountains and everything. Now, it is a very accessible thing that you can do with the technology. It is not horribly expensive, and there are a lot of places that have the capability. 
    • But in terms of these signs, as you mentioned, they come in all sizes and shapes. They might be mounted onto foam core or to these plastic street stands. You can see the save water every drop counts, which is hung from four grommets. It is those pieces of metal that have a hole in them that make it easier to put them on a hook or attach them or screw them into a wall. There are all sorts of different mounting techniques.
    • Some of my favorites are these things - they are sometimes called feather signs. Both have stands on the bottom. Very often, you will see this style of sign printed on wide-format devices. Very often on fabric because it is economical. It takes color really well, and they are just planted on the verge of the shopping center or out by the street. They just stamp them into the grass, and they stand there and flutter in the breeze. Those are really popular.
    • You also get traditional framing of some of these things. You might get something that is a large format that is actually framed or wrapped around a frame, or framed on the outside of it in order to give it some visual appeal.
    • Anything that you can think of to do with a sign is going to involve some sort of mounting hardware and some sort of stability for the sign. Again, these are only a few of the options. 
    • [00:11:02] Ryan McAbee: Mounting really does run the gamut here in terms of how it can be put up, but to do that, you probably also have to cut it at some point.
    • We mentioned that there are many different ways to cut products. One is a contour. I love this example on the left path. Maybe you can explain. I think you saw this somewhere.
    • [00:11:20] Pat McGrew: This is one that I saw at a conference. There were actually four of these football player cutouts in different heights so that somebody down here at 5'1" where I am could take their picture with it. If you were 6'3", you did not have to hunch - they had one for you too. It is not only printed, but it is contour-cut around the sides so that you have the figure of the body. Then you can stand there and have your picture taken as a football player. We see these used a lot at trade events. It used to be that people would actually paint them. It used to be something that you would see at carnivals and things where somebody would paint a clown figure or a strong man figure or something. 
    • Now because the technology has come so far, you can print one of these on a wide-format printer to be the local football team. The local soccer team, the local baseball team, just somebody standing in your company's uniform and letting everybody take their picture with it. It is very easy to execute, but the cutting needs to be precise. This is one of those cases where a pair of scissors is not going to do it for you. You are going to need some very precise ability to cut, to get all the angles and everything correct, and make sure that it has the appearance you want it to have.
    • [00:12:37] Ryan McAbee: In the wide-format space, it is not as common to have die-cutting. It is theoretically possible, but what you are going to see more often are the tabletop cutters that work on an x-y axis. You can retool them. You can have a cutting tool in it. You could have maybe a scoring tool depending on what you are laying down on the table and how you need it to finish.
    • For fabric-based stuff, it is more common that you might have a rotary cutter. It is just a wheel that is going through, and you can have it cut down the middle in a straight cut. Then, of course, you have the guillotine, but the guillotine cutting is also limited. You can only make a wide enough cutter so far with all the weight for the guillotine. Really probably the most popular option is laser cutting - it is evolving. We probably will see more of this in this space as time goes on. But it is the flatbed cutters that are dominant in this space. 
    • [00:13:25] Pat McGrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the other things to remember is that sometimes people use wide-format devices to print things that are actually going to become small in their final iteration. That is where they might start on one cutting device and then move to a guillotine device in order to get the final cuts that they want.
    • [00:13:44] Ryan McAbee: To round it out here, we have this stitching and welding term. I tried to find some examples where we could zoom in a little bit to see, not necessarily the welding process, but what the finished product looked like after the fact. 
    • On the bottom, there are grommets or holes so that you can hang them up. The way that the material has been flipped over on its edge and then with heat, creates that nice finished edge. It also gives it a bit of a gusset, as you said, Pat.
    • Anything else to mention in terms of the stitching and the welding?
    • We did not really talk too much about the stitching. 
    • [00:14:14] Pat McGrew: It is one of these things where you are looking for the intended purpose of the piece. This is a conversation you want to have with the customer. Where is this piece going to be used? Are you going to mount it? Are you going to screw it to a wall? Are you going to hang it from the ceiling? Are you going to put it in a stand? Or is it a table drape? You would want different kinds of finishing, especially if you are going to be doing a table graphic. That is one of those things where you want to understand - do they want the logo centered? Do they want it off-center? How do they want to use it? You want to make sure that all the edges are really nice and firm because the last thing you want is for them to use it three or four times and for the edges to start to unravel. It does not look good, it is not attractive, and it does not really meet the needs. You will find a lot of different approaches to getting the right kind of edging on things like table drapes. 
    • But if you are going to put a pole through something, you might sew the flap. You might turn it under and sew a couple of lines of stitches. A lot of companies do that, or you might actually use that same welding process.
    • To accomplish mounting, you probably have five or six choices at any step in the process. The other thing is that this can be a service, right? It is an area of finishing that lends itself to up charging. It might be that you offer simple stitches at one price. If you want really finished edges, we do the welding piece for you; we might charge you a different amount for that. If you want grommets of a tinier size, it is one price. Grommets that are easier to hang might cost a different price. Actually, putting the wide-format pieces into one of those pull-up things can be an extra charge and often is an extra charge.
    • For each kind of mounting, you are looking for the things you might give away as part of the price, but then all the upcharges that might be available to you. In some cases, that might even extend to installation. 
    • [00:16:05] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. And installation is a whole other component and world in the wide-format space. Because you have to get it to where it is supposed to be and on the wall. 
    • [00:16:13] Pat McGrew: You take classes to learn how to do the mounting for different types of venues. Vehicle wraps - it is a class that you go to. With the new technology that is used in billboards, you go to classes to learn those things. There is that opportunity to add additional services that you can sell.
    • [00:16:31] Ryan McAbee: We have been talking about stitching and welding from the finishing of the edges. These techniques can also be used when you need to print something really large in size. Most wide-format printers only go maybe to five meters or so at this point. When you have to do something like the side of a building or the helicopter example that you talked about before, Pat, where they are hanging something from the helicopter to be seen, you are probably going to have to print out multiple panels. Bring those together - again, stitching, welding, whatever technique is there to piece it together.
    • [00:16:59] Pat McGrew: This is all very accessible technology. You do not have to be a master engineer to understand any of it. It is all the stuff that you can buy. In most trade shows, you will see people showing the different kinds of equipment off. It is always worth looking at different vendors and different approaches to getting the finishing done that you might want to offer to your customer.
    • [00:17:19] Ryan McAbee: We always compare and contrast the different segments of printing against each other. This space and finishing for wide-format are more manually intensive than some of the other segments. Just because there has not been equipment or automation that has been brought into the space as paper-based printing has with its years of development.
    • With that said, we are always seeing new things at trade shows. We have seen some automated stitching equipment, maybe not so much for wide-format, but for the garment space. We have seen these evolutions, so we would expect to see improvements in this space as we go forward too.
    • [00:17:53] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. 
    • [00:17:55] Ryan McAbee: I think that is just dipping the toe in the water for wide-format finishing because it is a very dynamic space. We hope that you have enjoyed this episode, and we will see you back here at The Print University.
Share by: