Intro to Production Printing

01- Brief history of printing

A fast-paced trip to the past, present, and likely future of production printing. We start with essential developments in ink, paper, and moveable type before arriving at our AI-driven future.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: We are going to hop into the way-back time machine on our brief history of print, complete with a strange detour into winemaking, of all things. Stay tuned. It is Ryan and…
    • [00:00:11] Pat McGrew: …Pat… 
    • [00:00:12] Ryan McAbee: …from The Print University, here to cover millennia of print advancements in under seven minutes. Or, at least, we are going to attempt that.
    • Pat, are you ready for that big challenge? 
    • [00:00:20] Pat McGrew: I am ready to hop on the train. Let us take off here and see where we go. 
    • [00:00:24] Ryan McAbee: Excellent. Starting around 3000 BC - way back when - two foundational materials were developed that would contribute to what we now call the modern printing industry.
    • One, of course, is paper, and that really originated, in the early days, as papyrus by the early Egyptians. Then another development that was simultaneously happening around the same era was the creation of ink coming out of Asia. 
    • [00:00:44] Pat McGrew: Okay. But, then what?
    • [00:00:45] Ryan McAbee: Not a whole heck of a lot for a really long time, but let us jump forward all the way to 1400 AD.
    • [00:00:52] Pat McGrew: Alright, so most people have heard the story of Gutenberg. If you do not know anything at all about books or paper or anything else, you have probably heard about Gutenberg. He is credited with merging a bunch of concepts. The concept of movable type, the concept of reusable type, and methods to transform images in a mechanical fashion. 
    • Because we had printing, right? We typically did printing by forming solid page plates, then we stamped them down, and away we went. It just was not very efficient because if you made a mistake, it was very hard to correct. You had to make a whole new page. The idea of actually forming each letter in a very regular manner and the punctuation, making it reusable, and winding up with boxes full of As and Bs and Cs, and capital letters and lowercase letters - that comes out of a lot of different things, but Gutenberg puts it all together. 
    • It all really started with a wine press, and we promised you wine. One of the things that Gutenberg did that was so cool is that he started to take his skills as a silversmith, which allowed him to understand the fine creation of the letters, his understanding of being a winemaker, and his understanding of wine presses - the idea is that you would spin something up, and spin something down to press. 
    • He created frameworks to put movable type into so that. Not only could you press it onto a page once you inked it… you pressed it... you lifted it up again.  You put another piece of paper in, and you did it all over again. Then you take the framework out, and you can change the words; you can change the letters. What drove all of that was a conversation with the clergy in his local church who were interested in being able to produce something called indulgences, which was basically your ability to pay the church for your sins. Then you got a piece of paper that said that your sin was absolved. 
    • That drove a lot of Gutenberg's initial work. The first things he printed - lots were indulgences, but he took it from there, and it got really interesting after that. Once he knew how to do that, we get into that next space. We get into something, Ryan, that looks a lot more like the modern printing we know. 
    • [00:02:57] Ryan McAbee: Here are some early examples of printing as it spread across the globe. When it comes to that Gutenberg - the 42-line Bible -  was printed in 1455. It did not take a whole lot of time for Gutenberg to use those skills of winemaking based on gears and frames and screws and tension to figure out how to create this block of printing and then use it almost like a wine press to squeeze the ink onto paper. Prior to that, it was really all transcribed by monks or whoever else in the religious organization. This really democratized information for the first time. It really spearheaded everything past that in terms of the flow of information up until the days of the Internet, which made it even flow more freely. But, I digress. 
    • The other kind of examples that we see here are some of the first sheet music that was printed in 1473, and the first almanac in Europe appeared in 1457. What you will see in the history of print as we go through it is a lot of innovation periods in sprints, followed by really big pauses where everything is collecting and maturing and getting better and more efficient. Then there will be another spurt. 
    • Let's talk a little bit about the more modern era of printing. 
    • [00:03:59] Pat McGrew: As we came out of the 1700s, there was the Poor Richard’s Almanac - another thing that we probably all learned about in school - that was one of those kinds of calendars and things to help farmers do their job better. Technology kept moving forward. We got into the industrial age: cogs, wheels, and mechanical. The era of going beyond levers came along, and we ended up with a pretty strong run in the printing industry. 
    • Photo engraving and rotary letter presses really got into full swing when we started applying those mechanical concepts to create repeatable processes. A funny thing happened in the printing industry. We got this explosion of technology, which meant we got an explosion of publishing. All at the same time. And we started using repeatable processes for pretty much everything we do in everyday life.
    • [00:04:45] Ryan McAbee: That is true. I was even surprised. I have been in the printing industry for 20 years now, and I did not realize that most of what we considered modern printing techniques or methodology today actually started in the 1800s with gravure, lithography, flexo, and everything. Again, it is the innovation spurt, and then a long time for it to mature and get into a commercial application. 
    • Ironically though, a development as we move into the 1900s with the digitization of things - we get out of the physical realm, and we go into more bits and bytes - probably the most profound impact came from outside of our industry. And Pat, I am sure you remember that iconic commercial from 1984.
    • [00:05:19] Pat McGrew: I do. I can remember actually watching it the first time on television, and it was this Orwellian mood in the commercial broken by this scrappy runner coming down and throwing a giant hammer at a screen of a boring-looking guy. This was the commercial that paved the way for Apple.
    • It was what paved the way for more of that democratization of print. It took typesetting out of the hands of professionals who were experts in things like leading, line spacing, and making everything fit. It put it onto a screen where anybody with just a little bit of computer skill and a little bit of ability to follow a user manual, could figure out how to do their own typesetting for their own publishing needs.
    • It was funny because it led to an interesting era. The rise of products like PageMaker and Quark and all the Adobe products. Also, products like Microsoft Word and WordPerfect - which was my original tool of choice. They actually made it possible for us to not only create but to fix things and edit things after we created them. To tune them up and fix them, all as a single process, reducing the time it took to get from an idea to something that could actually be printed. It was a pretty fascinating era, and if you think about it,  1984 was not that long ago, right? We are talking about 38 years, and in that period of time, we have gone from somewhat complex typesetting programs to every 12-year-old knows how to type and format and make something bold or italic or put a heading in and can publish their own.
    • [00:07:01] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. I think we have probably been in a sprint; time will tell as we look backward. Since 1984, we really have seen that whole desktop publishing revolution. We have seen the digitization of things like plate-making and so forth to help with analog printing.
    • With that said, Pat, what do we expect to be the catalyst for this century? The big aha!
    • [00:07:18] Pat McGrew: There are a lot of things. Once the genie escapes the bottle, you cannot really put it back in. Now we are looking at a period over the last two decades where we have seen the rise of inkjet.
    • Inkjet is a technology. The thing about inkjet is that you are squirting droplets at a substrate, and in some cases, you are squirting them up or on an angle or down. You can do all sorts of interesting things. With inkjet, we can now print on pretty much everything, right?
    • For all the years that we were doing digital printing with toner-based technologies or even dot matrix technologies, there was this assumption that there was a piece of paper that you were aiming at that was in a reliable orientation. Good high-speed inkjet still relies on that, but today we use inkjet printing to print directly on cans and bottles. My favorite is printing on trucks, right? You can set up a big inkjet printer and actually print the side of a truck. A researcher at the Southwest Institute showed me printing directly on planes. 
    • You start to think about where printing technology has gone - from requiring the wine press to press things down and hand setting things to taking an idea, getting it into a design program, and squirting it at a plane.
    • It has been an amazing thing. We are just not squirting on planes or paper. We have also added digital embellishment technology. We have added this thing called functional printing and highly industrialized printing, which allows us to do printing in the very latest stages of manufacturing.
    • You could do all sorts of interesting origami printing - folding your paper and print on it at the last minute. You do not have to necessarily print and then fold. You can now fold and print. 
    • [00:08:54] Ryan McAbee: Printing does not live in a vacuum. You obviously have to have a lot of enabling technology, whether that is software-specific things or sensors.
    • We are seeing a lot of that come to fruition and at its infancy today. Those are things like sensors that are being embedded into the equipment. The whole goal there is to either alleviate the work that a traditional operator has to do or do it in a more standardized and repeatable way. To take that burden of knowledge also off of the operator so that they can just focus on running the piece of equipment. 
    • We are seeing a lot of that in some of the digital inkjet equipment that you were talking about today. Only mature and getting better as we go forward. The other thing that we are seeing is that kind of assistance of labor - robots. These robots do not have to be the ones that you think of in a warehouse. These can be software robots, too. Software robots work in a way where input comes in a file - I'm going to take these steps; I'm going to arrange myself to make these processes, and link them together to automate  - without user input. Freeing that labor component and making things very repeatable.
    • And, of course, to get us all there, are Machine Learning techniques and the bigger bucket of Artificial Intelligence. That is the enabling technology part. But we also have, like you said, Pat, come a long way when it comes to material sciences.  
    • [00:10:03] Pat McGrew: We have. You start to look at papyrus in the beginning, right? It was a very manual process to create it. It was a very rough substrate. Interestingly, it has lasted for a very long time. Even some of the original paper processes, the paper creation processes, were so robust that they created material that could last a very long time. 
    • Today we focus on paper a lot. We have a lot of conversations about paper. In our world today, most papers are made by big traditional paper mills. They have been focused, for the last 30 or 40 years, on meeting the needs of offset lithographers, people who need to print newspapers, books, and magazines.
    • They started turning some attention toward digital requirements. Printing with toner is a little bit different than printing with ink. The paper mills pivoted a little bit to make sure that they had paper available for those environments. Then over time, as digital printing took on more capabilities, inkjet printing grew. The paper required for high-speed and industrial inkjet printing is a little bit different in terms of the characteristics that it wants than what you need for toner or even for offset printing. So they pivoted again. 
    • The challenge is that they are trying to keep up with demand. They are trying to keep up with the changes in ink technologies, both on the offset side and on the digital inkjet side. There is constant R&D going on just for paper. Meanwhile, we started printing on all sorts of other things. 
    • If you are in the sign business today, it is not uncommon for you to be printing on Coroplast or to be printing on glass or metal. Today you do not actually have to print on a transferrable graphic - display graphics that attaches to a window - you could actually print directly on the glass and mount the glass right there. There are all sorts of interesting things you can do. We just said you can print on an airplane. In an industrial setting, we print directly onto cans, bottles, and bottle lids. 
    • Have you ever wondered how the expiration dates get onto the yogurt that you buy at the food store or your gallon of milk? That is printing that gets that expiration date on there. It is part of late-stage manufacturing processes. Through all of it, we have also managed to develop materials that have all sorts of interesting characteristics.
    • If you are a restaurateur and you need menus that can be outside as well as inside, you might be printing on a substrate that is waterproof and tear-resistant. If you are in a school setting, especially a primary school setting, you might be looking for tear-resistant types of paper for the primers and the things that the kids are using in the school just so they last a little longer.
    • If you are printing things that need to be outside, waterproof is really important. Lightfast is really important. One of the things we know about both ink and toner is that they react to the UV rays of the sun. So those are all things. The development and materials are constant and ongoing. It is just going to get more and more interesting over time.
    • [00:12:57] Ryan McAbee: The ones that I am just amazed at are the materials that you print floor graphics on. It needs to have scuff resistance, so you do not slip as you step on the thing. The other one was obviously that one that came in vogue more recently or was more widespread - the fact that you can have antimicrobial, almost disinfectant materials and coatings, which obviously helps with reducing any kind of transfer of diseases.
    • We did a podcast with a gentleman sometime last year. He serves the cruise industry, and antimicrobial paper is a huge part of his story because every cruise ship wants it. They want to know that people handing menus out and all the other millions of pieces of paper that go with a cruise -  they want to know that it is not transferring anything.
    • The R&D in material science is just amazing, and it is going to continue to be amazing as we learn more about things we can do to make paper even more resistant to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 
    • To wrap it up and take us out here, I think the summary is that print has been around for a really long time.
    • It had a little bit of a detour into winemaking in its origins but has a really bright future and continues to push forward on the technological front.

02- what is production printing

Production printing is a huge (billions of dollars) industry, yet hidden industry due to its diversity and fragmentation. Get introduced to the essential applications, six primary types of printers, and the typical components of the organization.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: When people think of printing, they probably think of books and magazines and newspapers. That is all good print, but there are so many segments. This is such a large industry to explore. That is what we are going to do. It is Pat and… 
    • [00:00:15] Ryan McAbee: …Ryan… 
    • [00:00:16] Pat McGrew: …and we are from The Print University. We are your tour guides for this diverse business.
    • So Ryan, what the heck is production? 
    • [00:00:26] Ryan McAbee: That is a very good question. I thought a lot about this, and there are different ways that you may try to narrow it down. It does not fit into a nice tidy box, I have to say. The best way we can explain it is that it is really an industry that provides professional-level print marketing and communication services. You are delivering that to a diverse set of clients, from individual consumers to the biggest companies that you can think of and marketing agencies around the globe.
    • The difference versus what people traditionally may have done at their office printer or their home printer, to differentiate, is that in a production environment, you can print just a single copy of something, like a book of one, as we call it in the industry. But more than likely, production-level printing is something that can scale. It can scale and keep costs very contained, in a cost-efficient manner. You can print thousands or tens of thousands if you still had that kind of print run. Think of M&M packets, right? Candy packets. Those are needed in the millions globally, and they can still be produced at a production printer. 
    • [00:01:18] Pat McGrew: This is a big industry. It lends itself to big numbers.
    • People always will ask, how many printers are there in the world, and how many pages are printed? The reality is that in printing, it is not all pages, right? Posters are printed. We have talked in previous episodes that you can print an airplane. So you know, how many pages is that? I do not know. 
    • When we talk about printing, there are a lot of numbers that you will see thrown around. The thing to remember is that while the US government might say there are X number of printers in the US or that the printing shipments are $81 billion, the thing is, we really do not know. How big is it? We do not know if we are accounting for all the printing that gets done in these sorts of niches. Think about universities with their internal print shops and all the work that they print for teachers. They might have class handouts. We do not know how many pages there are. 
    • It is a really big industry just in terms of single-page print in education or in book printing, or in flyer printing, or in billing/statement printing. But there is so much more to it, Ryan. We know that some companies are so fragmented that they do not even know how much they are printing.
    • I am not sure that Vistaprint knows. 
    • [00:02:29] Ryan McAbee: We cannot know with absolute certainty. I think this is true of any industry in any kind of forecasting or trying to get to numbers; you do not know exactly, directionally, what is happening. What we do know about the printing industry, the production printing industry, is that it is one of the biggest, almost hidden, industries out there. It is very large, but the reason it does not appear that way is that it is so highly fragmented. 
    • If you think about it, even in the largest printers around the globe that we can name, there is still only about a $4 billion revenue turnover, give or take, somewhere in that range.
    • When you compare that to the likes of a Google or an Apple, or even a Proctor and Gamble, the scale is quite different. There are so many of these printing establishments around the globe that it adds up in aggregate to a big industry. 
    • [00:03:10] Pat McGrew: There is so much that we do not know about production printing. This is absolutely true. I think when we start to look at what production printers actually do make, it is broad. 
    • [00:03:22] Ryan McAbee: It really is, and it has been broadening. In the past, if you rewind the clock several decades ago, it was not uncommon to say, “I'm this type of printer. I am a commercial printer. I am a book printer. I am a packaging converter.” So it is very narrow. Most printing establishments focused on a handful of products or at least a particular type of printing application set.
    • Today that has changed. The reason it changed is because the technologies have evolved. You have the rise of inkjet. You have all the digital technologies, whether electrophotography or all the other ones out there that are unlocking new capabilities. You can do variable designs. You can do variable data that is personalized. You can do all these other kinds of things. You are printing more on a diverse set of technologies for most printers. That is true across all these different kinds of categories that you see here. 
    • You have business / office collateral. Those are things that any kind of business needs, from business cards to letterhead. You have, on the other end of the spectrum, all the publishing kind of work like books, magazines, and things that consumers know very well. Really it is the fact that printers today have expanded because they can. The equipment that can do this has lowered in cost. They can take it on. They can almost, in a way, experiment more, Pat, to produce these other types of lines of business that they are going after. That is really what they are doing. 
    • We know that in the purest sense. Let's take the business category as an example, with business cards and so forth. That has been commoditized. You are not getting a high return on most of that work unless you are super-efficient in producing it. You are chasing other things that have higher margins, like packaging as one particular area that people have identified more recently as a growth opportunity.
    • Where else do you see this going in terms of a growth applications opportunity as we sit here today and go forward, Pat? 
    • [00:04:56] Pat McGrew: I am a big fan of bundles because it is one of the things that can bring value to the printing industry. As you noted, business cards are a commodity item. You can get them as cheaply or expensively as you want, depending on what you want to pay for them. If you are in a business environment, or you are running a new electoral campaign for somebody who is running for office, and you need to print for that person, smart printers can find ways to add value to that print sale by bringing a bunch of different pieces together.
    • They have to have the hardware to do it or partnerships with other people who have hardware who can help them do it. I think a lot of the value starts to come in the print industry from building stories that will resonate with the clients they are trying to serve, and helping them understand where print can fit.
    • You might be printing bills and statements for somebody, but that does not mean that you could not print direct mail for them because you are already handling data for them and you know how to handle data. You can expand in that direction. 
    • If you are a magazine printer or you are a book printer, you have opportunities in catalog printing. Catalogs have gotten really big again. They are cyclical, but people like catalogs. Magalogs are cool. Magalogs are an invention of a lot of retailers who found that they got better traction selling things if they told stories about the things they were selling.
    • If you think about a large retailer of hunting goods, for instance, the boots and the things to keep you warm in the deer stand, or the things to keep you warm while you're fishing. If you intersperse the things you are trying to sell to them with a story about Joe, the fisherman, or Jack, the guy who is deer hunting, or the family that goes out and hunts together - it resonates. What they found is that they got a higher degree of traction on the things in the catalog when there were stories that referred to them. A magalog sort of marries a magazine to the catalog selling process, which is fun. 
    • It works in funny ways. One of the interesting things that we have seen production printers get very smart about is helping people who want to do catalogs create really targeted catalogs. 
    • The weirdest one I think I ever saw was one for nuts and bolts. You do not think about nuts and bolts as being that sexy. An organization in France - their catalog had gotten so big that people almost did not want it anymore. They did not think that it was very green to have this giant catalog when they only ordered from four pages in the middle. The printer worked with the organization to identify what people bought, and then only sent them the pages that made sense for them. It increased their revenue because they were getting something that was much more focused on them. 
    • There are a lot of things that printers can do to be advisors to their clients. That might mean learning how to do folding carton packaging to help a client do special kinds of deliveries. It might mean learning how to do higher-end business cards. The real thick format ones or adding foiling and varnish to them. There are an awful lot of things that somebody can do to create a viable printing environment.
    • What else are we doing? What else are we talking about here? 
    • [00:07:51] Ryan McAbee: We talked about everything that can be printed, at least at high-level categories of products. Who actually does that printing? What are our traditional kinds of labels that we say, this is this type of printer versus that type of printer.
    • If we take that top row there up in the top left, we have a commercial printer. Now, this is the Jack of all trades. This is the print shop that usually has a lot of different types of equipment, a lot of different capabilities in terms of finishing, and how they can do different products. They will span a lot of those categories of products that we saw on the previous page. They generally will say yes to everything, even if they cannot figure it out. And they will figure it out to get the work done. A big part of the industry that is not talked about as much is that they will outsource that work to another printer who does have those capabilities and be the one face to the client.
    • The other type in the middle here is what is referred to as an in-plant, and that is basically a print operation that is attached to an enterprise or an organization like a university that is onsite. It can basically produce anything that organization needs from a print capability or at least get the request and outsource it, maybe to a commercial printer or somebody else in the industry that can actually produce those kinds of things. 
    • In-plants come in all shapes and sizes.
    • You can have very small ones of just one employee all the way up to 50-plus employees. They can also produce a wide range of print needs, whether it be like a booklet, training materials, or coursework materials in a university type of setting. Maybe they are an in-plant that is working for an insurance company that is doing more bills and statements type work. You get all these kinds of varieties, Pat? 
    • Then last on the top here is really that transactional printer. This is a printer that is really used to working in regulatory environments and with those kinds of verticals. You are thinking like financial, healthcare, all of those kinds of highly regulated industries, where you have to know what you are doing with data, and you have to know what you are doing with security. And Pat, I know you have been all over the security initiatives lately. 
    • [00:09:32] Pat McGrew: Oh yeah. Being a transactional printer today is not for the faint of heart. Laws are changing around you, and required security has to get tighter and tighter because you are dealing with a lot of personal data. Your cybersecurity requirements have definitely increased over the past few years. It is an interesting world living in transaction print land. 
    • Now, publication printers are as diverse, right? Typically, you think of them as book printers, but they may be printing financial data for large financial services companies. They may be printing catalogs. They may be printing all manner of things; even almanacs still get printed today. You can still buy an almanac. Catalogs. That is just the range. The characteristic of a publication printer is that they have the capability to bind. Some general commercial printers can bind, and some transaction printers can bind. Some in-plants have their own in-house bindery. One of their subsets would be a publication printer.
    • Binding comes in a lot of flavors because you might get that square back, perfect-bound with a hardcover. You might have a soft cover bind. You might have folios that are sewn together, that are then glued together into a binding. There are as many ways to bind a document, a book, a manual, or an instruction guide, as you can imagine. The little coil binders, the little drilled holes to put it in a three-ring binder. These guys have to be proficient and have capabilities. And all of them have the ability to outsource, right?
    • Now, sign shops are interesting  - one of these things is not like the other kind of organization. Sign shops very often have multiple devices that are capable of printing wider formats. They very often print on specialized materials. They might be able to print on banner material, vinyl, textile, and fabric-type material. We have all seen the big flags sitting out on the verges on the road - Come into my restaurant… Come into my barbershop. They typically produce all those things. They typically produce all the display graphics that you see in the windows of your favorite restaurant or your gas station, or your bank.
    • They produce all sorts of things, but they come in sizes, too. Some sign shops are confined to maybe something that is only a meter wide, three-feet wide. While other organizations can print what they call grand format. A printer I am familiar with in Australia prints the things that hang from the bottom of helicopters at soccer games. 
    • These guys have a lot of range. They may have flatbed printers that are capable of printing on things like corrugate and metal and all sorts of harder substrates. They may also have devices that can print roll-fed: roll vinyl, roll fabric, and rolls of specialized paper. Sometimes they have devices that are capable of doing both. There is just an amazing array that prints everything from the little wayfinding signs, the open house this way signs, all the way up to things that hang in your shopping mall, right? It is a pretty great array.
    • Then packaging converters, we talked a little bit about them, Ryan. Packaging converters may do the printing of the folding carton box or the liner material. Then, with corrugate, you print the liner, and then it gets corrugated and gets turned into a box. But it is initially a flat sheet, and it is the converting that takes it from a flat sheet into the things that have the flaps and the folds and everything. Folding carton, same thing. You start out printing a flat sheet, and then it goes through a cutting process that creates the template that finalizes the final piece. They have a specialized set of machinery.
    • Now we also bundled label printers into this group. Label printers have a slightly different set of requirements, right? They may have machines that are flexographic; they may be digital. There are a lot of different ways you can print labels. They may have machines that only print on a tiny, narrow range and just print two-inch white labels. They may be printing much wider and going through a die-cut process to cut the labels out. Tons and tons of technology in a packaging L&P shop, as we know. 
    • So it is a pretty wide array, and in the end, there are lots of departments that are involved. As we have mentioned before, a production printing environment has just an amazing array of people, right? No matter how big or how small the department is, or how big or how small the printing company is, they will have to have all of these functions in order to be able to sell work, manage work, and move it.
    • What is your favorite department? 
    • [00:13:39] Ryan McAbee: All these pieces are necessary. They may be called something different inside each organization. But at the end of the day, you have these kinds of functions and departments and people and processes that are done. It all starts at the beginning, of course, with interfacing with the client and figuring out what they actually want to have produced and then figuring out how you're going to do it internally. Through the prepress, to finishing, to warehousing. 
    • I do not necessarily have a favorite department, Pat. I would say the thing that I have a lot of history with is in the prepress kind of area. I think today, the most appealing thing that I am seeing going on in the industry is just this advancement of trying to figure out how to offload the burden of the operators.
    • And that is across the board, that is in prepress, that is in printing, that is in finishing. We are doing that by getting smarter devices. We are doing that through getting better kinds of sensors so that machines can become aware and smart about what is going on. Whether looking and reading a sheet as it is being printed at thousands of feet a minute and figuring out - okay, is there a problem in the actual printing? Then if there is, can I recognize what that problem is in the print and then automatically correct it without needing someone like an operator to actually do that? 
    • It is also from the aspect of just intelligence around software and workflows to be able to push the work through from the time you get the initial artwork and data from the customer and not have to touch it through multiple stages, multiple processes, multiple operators, that the software itself can have some intelligence around it. 
    • [00:14:58] Pat McGrew: One of the things we say is that every time you touch something, you are leaving money on the floor.
    • So that is what we want to stop. That is absolutely what we want to stop. 
    • [00:15:07] Ryan McAbee: Just to sum it up here, there are many different ways that printing can happen. There are many different types of print establishments or types of printers, whether you are a packaging converter, whether you are a general commercial printer, in-plant, etc., that we talked about.
    • At the end of the day, they all do share some similarities in terms of how they are structured.

03- ANALOG VS. DIGITAL PRINTING

An introduction to the primary differences between analog and digital printing, including strengths and weaknesses. We end with a brief description and examples that describe “hybrid” equipment.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew and welcome to The Print University. I'm here with my colleague from Pixel Dot Consulting, Ryan McAbee. Say, hi, Ryan. 
    • [00:00:11] Ryan McAbee: Hello everybody. 
    • [00:00:13] Pat McGrew: Today what we want to discuss is the differences between analog printing and digital printing. This is an important concept in the print industry because technology has evolved over the years, as you've learned from some other modules. One of the things we want to make sure that you understand when you are making your decision about what technology to pick is how they work and why they work the way they do. Ryan, when we talk about analog, we're really talking about the things we've discussed in other modules: offset and gravure and flexography.
    •  When we're talking about digital, we're talking about all those things that look like copy machines: toner, electrophotography, and inkjet. In the analog space where you've spent a lot of time, what are the most important things people need to know? 
    • [00:01:00] Ryan McAbee: This is like the often portrayed as like the Godzilla versus King Kong kind of debate or old versus new. In reality each technology has its purpose and its fit in the industry even today. To describe analog, the best place to start is that it needs to have a plate that's imaged and the plate is actually what receives the ink and then transfers it to the substrate or paper. It requires more processes to prepare the job, particularly because you have to make the plate and then you have to do the what's called the make ready on the physical press, which is getting it ready, mounting the plate, getting the ink in there, all of that kinda stuff.
    • Probably good to preface that, there's exceptions to every rule here as we go through these technologies because they're stretching and pulling in different ways to fit different purposes. But generally speaking, analog printing has a very high image quality.
    • It's a static print, meaning it is what it is from the first one out to the thousandths one that you print. It's all the same print in terms of not being variable. It also is generally well accommodated to very large print runs. You're talking thousands, 10 thousands. With gravure, you're talking easily millions. That's basically the hallmarks of analog. 
    • [00:02:07] Pat McGrew: Ryan, let me stop you for a second. Some of that's economic, isn't it? Because you have the challenge of all the cost of all that prep work, but there's also the cost of the plate. You wouldn't want to make a plate and spend all that money if you were only running 10 copies.
    • [00:02:21] Ryan McAbee: That's exactly right. It's the economics of it like you say, Pat. It's the fact that you've got consumable costs in terms of the plating material. You've got other costs that are different than digital in terms of the equipment itself, so it's higher capital expenditures. It costs more to get that equipment in place. You have to factor your costing models differently when you're quoting jobs or quoting work that customers want you to do. Then there's also the physical kind of element to it. This kind of analog print equipment is larger in terms of footprint, and it may be even environmental conditions that you need in terms of electricity, maybe some special ventilation for your actual plant.
    • Even though there is inline finishing possible. We think of that more for maybe cold offset where you're doing newspaper printing. You can, put your inserts into the newspaper and you can fold your newspaper and so forth. But generally speaking, most of the analog printing processes, tend to have the finishing done with offline or nearline equipment. It's not part of the same process. How does digital compare in your mind, Pat? 
    • [00:03:17] Pat McGrew: Digital is absolutely not that. It starts with the fact that we don't have all of the physical makeready, right?
    • We still have to do file preparation. We're still doing color management and making sure that we have a file that is printable. Then that file actually gets delivered to what's called a digital front end to a digital device. We're not going to a plate, we're actually going directly to the equipment that's going to put the marks on the paper.
    • Digital is the way that most of the bills and statements that arrive in your mailbox are printed. You're probably familiar with the technology if you've ever used a copy machine, right? All a copy machine does is scan using a scanner and then take that image and moving the marks onto the paper without, again, the benefit of a plate.
    •  It eliminates a lot of these preparation steps and. That means it eliminates a lot of cost. The interesting conversation that's happened in our industry over the last 10 or 15 years has been when should I print using an analog technology? When should I print using a digital technology?
    •  Digital is what you go to if you need variable data production. So bills and statements, every page is different. This is done digitally. If you are doing direct mail very often digital is the choice, if you are making different offers to different recipients. If you were doing those big box store coupons that are just your name and address on them, you might print them on the analog technology and then add the name and address with a digital technology.
    • Digital is the home of variable data printing, variable content printing. More and more it's also becoming the home of short-run static work. If you are doing book of one. If you are doing personalized books, personalized training material, these are the kinds of things we see more and more showing up on digital devices 
    • Now digital devices come in kind of two basic technologies. It's either toner or it's inkjet. They behave a little bit differently. They have slightly different color models. They look a little different if you actually hold the pages side-by-side. Traditionally toner was not considered as fast as inkjet printing, but they're getting closer and closer. 
    • If you are a book printer and you are in the market for some new hardware, you are probably having conversations with both your traditional analog hardware providers and the traditional digital providers to figure out what's going to work in your print shop the best. The thing that you know is that the print file that is in your asset library that you need to print, can probably print to either pretty easily. There's not a lot of prep work that goes into moving one to the other in terms of the technology. Now with digital, inline finishing is really common.
    •  There are book lines that are attached to high speed presses that automatically, print the book in the right page order. hand it off into the cutters, the stackers, the gluers, and the binders. Feeding the cover in at the right time. All that inline finishing is possible.
    • It's also really common to see inline finishing in bill and statement production where the bills and statements are printed, they're cut, they're perfed, they're folded, and they're stuffed into the envelope, all in one giant operation that a person never touches. We say that in digital we are a little bit more limited in color. We are definitely limited in substrates.
    • Analog printing, you can print on just about anything. I've seen people printing on leather. You can print on glass, right? You can print on plastic. You can print on pretty much anything. 
    • Digital's a little touchier because toner will only stick to certain things. It's a silicon based technology. It's got to have a way to get fused to the thing that you're trying to print on, so there are some limitations there. 
    • Inkjet is an even more interesting challenge because every inkjet device manufacturer is responsible for their own ink formulations. In analog, typically ink is based on what you're printing on and the requirements of the type of printing you're doing. It might be UV curable ink. It might be dye based ink. It might be aqueous. But in inkjet, every print head is very picky. The manufacturers print heads are very specific for what kind of ink they'll take. 
    • When you're making your decisions about buying your digital inkjet device, you have to know what you're going to be printing on. You have to understand what the drying time will be and what the color availability is going to be. Am I buying a four color press or a six color press or an eight color press? There aren't a lot of variations available. I have to know what the drying time will be so that I know I can get it into finishing. 
    • Considerations on both sides, but it's all very doable, right? Whichever technology you might pick you're pretty confident that you would be able to get where you want to go and print what you want.
    • But Ryan, some of this comes down to really understanding the differences between the equipment, not just the technologies. 
    • [00:08:35] Ryan McAbee: The interesting thing is that we've been on this slow convergence between analog and digital. Because each one has taken bits and pieces in the best parts from the other. An example you mentioned that on some of the digital print equipment, you can have multiple colors stations, like a fifth color unit if it's electrophotography to do like a pink, neon, green, gold, metallic, like you could almost on an analog press. 
    • In the same line of thought, on the analog printing equipment, they've also made great strides on the automation part so that you can more cost effectively print smaller quantities. It's slowly melding together here. 
    • We have the list of analog printing methods here that are definitely the ones that we talked about that require plate or some additional processes geared toward long runs. We have the two core digital technologies, which are very diverse too. We haven't really talked about this other thing called hybrid Pat. What is that? 
    • [00:09:24] Pat McGrew: Hybrid is the fun stuff. I encountered my very first hybrid press probably 20 years ago, but they've been around much longer because printers are some of the most innovative people in the world.
    • It is rare to walk into a large print shop where they don't also have a tool shop in the back. They'll remake a machine if they don't like the way it's working. As we started to think about variable data as variable data, say in the 1980s and into the 1990s, a lot of innovative shops started to take a hard look at their offset devices. They might print offset shelves for the big credit card providers, for example. They started thinking why couldn't I build a press that would let me do that, but then also do the variable data before you know it I finish it off. You started to see companies build their own. They'd buy their press and then they'd go find somebody that would help them integrate toner technology, or very commonly inkjet technology. We used to call it hanging print heads off the back of the machine to initially just get name and address data.
    • If you've seen any of those big postcards in your mailbox from big box stores, a lot of times they're offset printed and then just your name and address is on there. Today, those can be accomplished by hybrid machines that do the offset printing and then feed directly into a hybrid end of the device where an inkjet head is hanging.
    • We used to call it spray and pray. Which was basically, hope we got the address correct and send it off into the mailbox. It's gotten so much more sophisticated, especially in the last 10 years. Today, there are all manner of vendor developed machines that have both analog and digital technology.
    • We see it a lot in flexography: label printing, pouch printing, any kind of consumer facing pieces where the color and the vibrance and the color range needs to be really wide, but they still want the ability to do some personalization. That personalization might be in the form of barcodes and tracking codes and expiration dates is a popular one, right? When was the last time you picked up, a yogurt. The yogurt always has an expiration date. Milk always has an expiration dates. Those get done by hanging an inkjet head off of a production line and getting the data to print on the way into the box. But in the hybrid technology, it's all part of the primary production process. Print the analog print, the digital, usually in that order, And then send it off into its finishing line. 
    • These devices that you see down on the very bottom is a hybrid flexography press that is doing both the flexography and the variable data printing effectively for different types of pouches and labels.
    • [00:12:12] Ryan McAbee: With hybrid, it's really trying to take the best of both worlds. It's trying to take the feature set of analog with its high production capabilities, high quality and diverse substrate range, but then marry it with that variable or customizable aspect of of using inkjet.
    •  All industries have a lot of terminology that can be used in many different ways. It is worth noting that you may hear hybrid in a different sense as well. That's with typically wide format signage machines, printers. Yeah, they can call them hybrid cause of the way the material feeds. It can use a roll fed material, but also a rigid flatbed material. You see a picture of one of those kind of devices up in the top right-hand corner. I guess to take it away here, Pat. Each technology has its own purpose and it really comes down to what application you're producing and how you're trying to deliver that really determines your path, correct? 
    • [00:13:00] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. For anyone who is working with one of these technologies today, which many of you are, it's worth doing a deep dive into the other kinds of technologies that are out there. They may help you expand the products and services that you can offer. The technology is just going to keep on changing and getting better and better. It's great to stay up to date with all of it. 
    • [00:13:22] Ryan McAbee: Thank you, Pat, for joining. Thank everybody else for joining, and we hope to see you on a future episode.

04- PRINT 101: ELECTROPHOTOGRAPHY

Launch your understanding of the core printing technologies with Electrophotography. The module covers the technology, equipment types, and applications that can be produced, in addition to suitable uses and considerations.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition of The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting, and I have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. Hello, Pat. 
    • [00:00:09] Pat McGrew: Hello there, Ryan.
    • [00:00:10] Ryan McAbee: Today, Pat, I know it is one of your favorite topics. We are going to talk about Electrophotography printing, more commonly known as just EP.
    • [00:00:19] Pat McGrew: Or laser printing, you will hear people refer to it as laser printing. This is the toner-based printing that most of us grew up with. Toner-based printing is one of those things that a lot of us do not really understand how it works. We just know that magically, we send a file over to a printer and magic things happen. It is a technology that was the natural follow-on to the things that we do in offset lithography and flexography in that it uses a drum as an imaging carrier. 
    • The way the technology works is that a file comes into a Digital Front End. The Digital Front End basically resolves the file into a format of rasters that the image-carrying technology applies to a drum. The drum is charged using those image rasters, and that is what allows it to receive the toner particles, which are little pieces of colored silicone. As it goes through that process, it is then transferred to the paper. The drum is discharged so that it is cleaned, and then it comes back around for the next image, right?
    • The technology has gotten better and better over the years. I can remember when we thought 25 pages per minute was a really big deal and really cool. These devices can go 500 images per minute, A4 or letter size images per minute. The technology has gone from being a single-up option to now there are toner devices that are actually quite wide all the way up to B1 and B2 size machines. So you can imagine really big drums. 
    • When I first came into the printing business, you were confined to one color. You could have black, or you could have black. We were really excited when we were able to add MICR, and there were two imaging units. We were able to do checks; I worked in transaction in my early years.
    • Today you have machines that print multiple colors. In fact, some of them are so sophisticated that they print a lot of different colors, sometimes with interchangeable units that you can pull in and out during the printing process that allow you to add neon colors and metallic colors.
    • The way to think of this technology is that every turn of the drum is a color of something on a substrate. Typically, you are going to find that these are pulp-based substrates. We typically do not see plastics and things running through your typical EP device because it needs heat. The heat would melt the plastic. 
    • We do see some new-age substrates coming through that a lot of these devices can handle. Teslin® is a substrate that is waterproof and tear-resistant. I say waterproof; it is water resistant is probably the more honest thing. You may have an insurance card in your wallet that is made of Teslin because it is very popular for things like that. Toner devices love printing on Teslin. A lot of restaurant menus use the same kind of substrate.
    • These new-age substrates may have plastic fibers in them. Some of them have stone - they are composed of stone fibers. The cool thing is that these devices come in every shape and every size, and they come in sheet-fed, and they come in roll-fed. 
    • [00:03:45] Ryan McAbee: My brain, for whatever reason, it was saying, the drum gets imaged, and then at some point, it is like an Etch-a-Sketch where it gets shaken almost. Everything falls off so that it can then go print another completely new image. That is the claim to fame of digital, that unlike any of the other technologies - maybe outside of inkjet technology, but that is a digital technology too - it can be a hundred percent variable from page to page. Meaning, not the same thing, which I think is pretty unique and cool.
    • [00:04:11] Pat McGrew: In the early eighties, when I was first working with high-speed toner-based equipment. I worked with both roll-fed devices and sheet-fed devices. We did actually call them big etch-a-sketches. That was how it was because that was exactly how we socialized what they did into the groups that needed to understand the technology. It is absolutely true. 
    • If you look at the equipment that we have here, it really is all sizes, all shapes, all sorts of configurations, and all sorts of different engine configurations. Almost every manufacturer in the digital space has a toner device or two, or eight or 12 that they offer into the space. A lot of these are the devices that you will find at the end of the aisle in an office. If you work in an office environment, the big printer that is available to you is a toner-based device. A lot of desktop printers have traditionally been laser printers. That is changing more into inkjet, but a lot of them were laser printers in the beginning. You can still buy them. 
    • The other advantage that these devices have, especially the cut-sheet devices, is that you can load them with different kinds of paper. One of the things I know from my history is that insurance companies, the large ones - all the names you see the commercials for - have traditionally been cut-sheet toner-based print environments because when they need to send your insurance package, there are a lot of different substrates involved. There are cover pieces, and there are your cards, which they typically want to make. They want them to be durable, and they may actually want to use different colored paper to identify different areas of your policy or to separate out different kinds of declarations and policies. They may also be printing claims checks, so they may have a whole hopper full of check stock that they are printing onto. That is something that a cut sheet device can do that a roll-fed device cannot do quite as well. 
    • [00:06:09] Ryan McAbee: The other thing that makes it interesting is when you start combining these things. You have the actual printing engine, where the laser and the drum and all that is. On the front end, you can have all those multiple paper sources that you were talking about. Then on the back end, you can have all this cool inline finishing so that literally, by the time it comes out as a finished product, you could have something that has many different kinds of paper or substrates as part of the final product, like a cover and then inside text pages for a booklet as a more simple example. And then it could have gone through folding and stitching. 
    • [00:06:40] Pat McGrew: There are organizations that actually use these cut-sheet devices for book printing. They put a book line - finishing line on the back end of it. They have the ability to draw from multiple hoppers so they can put the cover into one hopper. They can put the book block stock into another hopper, and it all flows through. Magic happens in the workflow, and it comes out on the back end as a fully finished book, right?
    • They are really versatile machines. These devices - you can buy them in black-only configurations. You can buy them in four-color configurations. There is a whole range of devices in the marketplace today that support violet and orange and green, and, as I said, neons and metallics.
    • It is worth understanding that if you are a designer or if you are working with designers, having these capabilities available is something that I do not think is as widely known as the market would like it to be. 
    • On this application set, we have some of the usual suspects. Things like invoices and billing statements. Newsletters are very commonly printed on these cut-sheet devices. People make business cards on them because they can. They typically will handle thicker stocks. 
    • If you look at these two: the one that says Northeast Waters Conservation League and the one next to it which says Scorpions. Those are actually two images courtesy of Ricoh that are from one of their devices that allows you to print with neon colors. The really cool thing that is happening in the toner space right now is not only these neon colors, which really create some amazing digital imagery, but also the ability to print with white toner. 
    • One of the holy grails of printing has been the ability to print with white toner on dark stocks.  You do it for two reasons. One is that you may want to actually print white on the dark stock without having to create knockouts, which is a process that designers are not always delighted to do. The other thing is that you may be trying to make something brighter looking. You may put a layer of white down and then print your yellow or cyan on top of it to make it really bright and stand out.
    • The ability to handle all these toners is getting more and more interesting. If you look at how the manufacturers have approached it, they typically come to print shows with applications that allow them to show the way you do it by pulling cartridges in and out of the machine during the print process. It will print everything it needs to print, and then it will recycle everything back to the beginning while you change a couple of cartridges to add a metallic or a neon or whatever. Then it will print it, and then it will come out as a finished job. Pretty much everything on the list can be done.
    • On that very right side where you see the thing that says web to print. that is actually a book. That book is actually printed on a toner-based device. They print the covers, and then they print the book block, and then they put it all together. It is cool the things that you can do. 
    • [00:09:45] Ryan McAbee: You were talking about the white aspect of having white toner. We talked a little bit about how this process uses heat, but there still are some clear substrates that you can run through for like labels where that white becomes another advantage to be able to put that layer down so that you can then put the color on top of it - so you can actually see it. If you just were to put the color toner on a clear substrate, you would not see much. 
    • [00:10:06] Pat McGrew: I am old enough that I remember putting transparencies through a digital toner printer, before PowerPoint. 
    • [00:10:17] Ryan McAbee: Yes. I am with you on that.
    • These electrophotography devices are pretty versatile in and of themselves. That is becoming more so over the years as they have added these additional unit printing capabilities. Also, the material science behind everything has improved over years, between the toner and the substrates and how they interact with each other.
    • [00:10:34] Pat McGrew: They have. The thing to remember about toner is that it is silicon-based. It has physical properties to it. Because it is silicon-based and it is fused to the top of the paper, you tend to get brighter colors because it is not being absorbed by the paper. It is the same reason that it could actually print on plastic-type stocks that can handle the heat. The other thing is that if you were to put a loop on text blocks that were printed on a toner device versus other technologies, what you will see is that the edges of the text are just amazingly crisp. You can actually print very tiny. It is possible to print micro text because it is so crisp. 
    • There is just a lot of technology that goes into creating. Remember, we are going faster and faster every year. These devices are not only dealing with drums that have to go faster and discharge faster, but handle higher and higher volumes, which means they need longer duty cycles. That is a conversation you should be having with your vendor of choice about what the real duty cycle is between maintenance events. As they get more sophisticated, they typically need more maintenance.
    • [00:11:50] Ryan McAbee: You are talking about the quality aspect there, and it can really produce just brilliant pieces. It is funny, how it has changed over time. Because at one point, EP and digital printing were considered a second step down to offset lithography, which was considered the best quality you could get. Today that is not really true. Now there are different use cases for each of them, but really the quality that comes out of some of these EP devices is pretty remarkable. 
    • [00:12:16] Pat McGrew: It is. One of the things we covered in one of our other episodes was the number of processes it takes to prepare the work to get onto the device. To get into the printing cycle.
    • A nice thing about these toner-based devices is that once you prep the file, you  have done your color management, you have it all profiled, and you know what you are printing to, you send it to a Digital Front End, and you let it loose, right? And it moves its way through the press and then, in many cases, into inline finishing, sometimes into offline finishing. Once it is prepared, it is ready to go there. There are no other people involved. There are organizations that figure out how to create almost lights-out printing using these devices with really highly automated work going into the DFE, into schedulers, that manage what goes to the DFE and when. And then into inline finishing, resulting in a final product coming out of the back end ready for delivery to the client.
    • [00:13:16] Ryan McAbee: That is right. When we were crafting these points for consideration, we always had to use an asterisk. In certain cases, there are products that kind of defy some of these points. Generally speaking, the thing with digital EP versus analog is that it is typically slower. Now, there are some exceptions to this. Obviously, you can get some roll-fed EP that is quite fast that counters this argument. In general, when we're talking about a class of machines that can do 100, 140 images per minute, that is definitely slower than what you can do with the equivalent offset press.
    • The cost tends to be a little bit higher for your consumables. The model that has been established around the EP is you have your consumables from your toner, but you also have click charges where you are getting charged every cycle of the drum. 
    • [00:14:00] Pat McGrew: Those click charges pay for your maintenance costs. So you have the cost of acquisition, which might be a cash payment or a lease. You have click charges that are covering your maintenance costs, and then you have your cost of the toner plus your substrate. All of those things should be going into your cost of goods sold as you decide what you should be charging for the printing. 
    • The other thing, Ryan… we have talked in another episode about flexography and how it is the most common way that labels are done. Today we are seeing an awful lot of short-run label printing on these EP devices. There are organizations that have gotten very good at creating the right color management and the right substrate selection to allow you to print onto pouches and onto label stock in production mode, which has become very popular for things like boutique grains and granolas. Even boutique dog food was the latest one that I saw, which I thought was interesting. The package comes with your dog's name. 
    • A lot of the big EP machines are providing those services now. They are doing it in short runs. Sometimes a hundred or 200 pieces, but sometimes even longer runs - 10, 20, 40,000 depending on the operation that is actually doing the printing. The technology is incredibly versatile. 
    • [00:15:17] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, it is changing and always improving. Even though we say it is more limited in terms of color. What you can do for embellishment, and also just the amount of materials that you can run through these devices. Never underestimate. It seems like every year, there is some new advancement that has been made to counter this.
    • [00:15:32] Pat McGrew: Even over the last two years, we have seen an awful lot of interesting announcements in the toner space. Every vendor that works in the toner space has brought new equipment to market or upgraded equipment that they have in the field. A lot of them are adding more color stations, just more versatility every time we see them.
    • I think our takeaway from our EP episode is... if you are currently printing digitally with EP, keep an eye on what is available from the vendors that you want to work with. They will constantly be upgrading things, and they may have offerings that would help you expand the range of products and services you can offer. 
    • If you are currently living in the analog space, these are great machines to bring into your organization because they do not require a lot of expertise to execute them. Your same prepress team can prepare files for these machines the same way they do for your plate-making environment, and it doesn't take a highly skilled person to run the press.
    • [00:16:32] Ryan McAbee: Very good point. So thank you, everybody, for joining this episode, and we hope to see you on a future one soon.

05- PRINT 101: OFFSET LITHOGRAPHY

An introduction to the most common analog printing technology — offset lithography. This session covers the technology, equipment types, and applications that can be produced, in addition to practical uses and considerations.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to the Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and I have Pat McGrew from McGrewGroup with us, too. Hey Pat! 
    • [00:00:08] Pat McGrew: Hey, Ryan. We have a really cool topic! 
    • [00:00:12] Ryan McAbee: We have one that is the old man in the room, so to speak: Offset lithography. It is a production printing method that has been around for a long time and is still today considered the workhorse of the industry. 
    • [00:00:23] Pat McGrew: It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. If you look back at the changes in the printing industry, we migrated from letterpress to offset lithography within our lifetime. Which is interesting. More of my lifetime than yours, but it has been interesting to watch these sea changes happen in the printing industry, and they just seem to keep happening faster.
    • One of the things that made offset lithography possible was precision engineering and precision mechanics. It is possible to create a device that will reliably print, over and over again, so you can register the colors and create a final entity. 
    • [00:00:59] Ryan McAbee: That is absolutely correct. You can only make a mechanical system so precise, but to even allow for those conditions where there might be a little bit of offsetting - we had technology that came along to create things like bleeds so that you would not see white paper because the cylinders were not in precise alignment.
    • The way that offset lithography actually works is - more than any of the other print technologies, particularly analog print technology - it has more rollers and cylinders involved in the process. You have water and this whole ink chain of rollers, and what they are doing is always creating an ink and water balance. Since it is oil-based ink, they do not mix. The image part of the plate receives the ink. The non-imaged part does not print anything when it goes to the offset cylinder. That is why it is called offset lithography  - because we do not go directly from the plate to the paper or substrate. It goes to an offset blanket, and then it is transferred to the cylinder.
    • That is the high level of how it works. You need a very experienced operator. To really dial that in, get the color just right and keep it throughout. 
    • [00:01:53] Pat McGrew: One of the points that you made when we were talking before is that you only use one ink in each one of the ink units. It is one color: cyan, yellow, magenta, or black. It could have spot colors. It could have orange, violet, or light gray. There are different combinations, which means offset presses can come in a variety of sizes and shapes that all require a certain complexity in terms of how they operate.
    • [00:02:21] Ryan McAbee: The kind of sizing that we are looking at on the screen. First and foremost, there are two different kinds of feeds for the material. There are sheet-fed, which uses pre-cut sheets that are put into the feeder of the press and then run through to the delivery.
    • There are also web-fed presses, which use a roll of paper that gets taken through much faster. There are different applications that are suited for the different types, formats, sizes, and types of paper deliveries. One of the most popular, in terms of offset lithography equipment, is that 100, 102 to 105 millimeters range, I guess it is centimeters. I do not deal well with the metric system. It is basically a 40-inch equivalent sheet width in terms of American measurements. I guess Pat, that is a B1 sheet, correct? 
    • [00:02:57] Pat McGrew: I have my handy sheet. 
    • [00:02:58] Ryan McAbee: Ah, you have your sheets.
    • [00:02:59] Pat McGrew: Yeah, I have the handy cheat sheet because I can never remember what B1, B2, and B3 are. Your B1 sheet is what you said. It is just your 40 by 28-inch size sheet that is so common. 
    • [00:03:12] Ryan McAbee: Then the other thing that is interesting about offset printing is that you do need basically one printing unit, or tower as they sometimes are referred to, per color. You can also have something in there known as a perfector. What that does is it will flip the sheet as it is running through the press, so you can print on the front side and the backside. A 4/4 perfecting press has a total number of eight units. But you are going to put the perfecting unit right in the center, so you can print four colors, flip the sheet, and print the next four colors.
    • [00:03:37] Pat McGrew: Ryan, that describes what we see in a lot of print specifications. We see these cute little fractions that look like they might say 4/0 or 2/0, or even 1/0. In those cases, we are talking about the fact that they are printing on only one side of that sheet. But if you see 4/4 or 4/2, that is where we are referring to color or marking happening on both sides of the sheet. 
    • [00:03:59] Ryan McAbee: That is absolutely right. There are a lot of different ways to go into production and run these types of jobs. You can change how you actually move or flip the sheets as they go through, even if it is not a perfecting press that can automatically do it. You can run things sheetwise, which is basically turning the sheet this way. Or you can do a work-and-tumble, which is tumbling the sheet over after you get one side done. When it comes to offset, you can also run the same sheet or same substrate through the press multiple times if you need to add more colors. Now, of course, there is an added cost to all that you have to factor in.
    • [00:04:29] Pat McGrew: And a little bit of complication in the workflow. Just a little bit. But when we are doing offset printing, we know that sheet-fed offset is the most popular and that there is web-fed offset. 
    • Now, all of that printing has to be dried in most cases. We have two different ways of getting the paper dry that can happen. We can have heat set, which actually uses dryers, and we can have what they call cold set, which basically is mostly evaporation, almost the natural form of drying. Different printers will use different techniques depending on the kind of work that they are doing and what they are trying to accomplish.
    • [00:05:03] Ryan McAbee: Cold set is usually more associated with web-fed offset printing because, not only does it not use the generated heat, it relies upon absorption. But that means that whatever you are printing on has to be able to absorb that ink. 
    • So think of it almost like a paper towel as you are wiping up something that you spilled. Same kind of analogy, but translate that into newsprint. Newsprint is very absorbent. That is an application where you would use those two combinations. 
    • For the most part, in a commercial print environment, you are probably going to find sheet-fed that is heat set - that has some kind of drying component. That is going to be critical because if you are running more of a glossy coated stock to begin with, where the ink sits on top because of that coating, you want to be able to dry that so that you can then go and take it to the finishing department and do your folding, your cutting, that sort of stuff.
    • [00:05:41] Pat McGrew: All those things. 
    • We mentioned technology. We talked a little bit about equipment. So now let's talk about the applications. 
    • All right. The sky is the limit. 
    • [00:05:50] Ryan McAbee: It is almost the world of printing. It is really hard to draw the box very neatly around offset printing because you have such a diverse range of materials that you can print on.
    • You can print on paper, but you can print plastics and things up to a certain thickness, depending on how the press is configured. Then you also have numerous inks and coatings. You can do varnishes, spot varnishes, metallic foiling, and all this other kind of stuff that we typically put in the bucket of embellishments.
    • On top of that, you have all kinds of different format sizes, particularly if you get into the really large presses that are the B1 or larger. Then you start where it is a single page; it could be booklet work or book work. It could also be oversized work like posters and things of this sort.
    • So, it really does span the gamut. 
    • [00:06:28] Pat McGrew: One of the facets of offset printing that we often see because of the nature of the jobs that are being printed - printers might choose to try and optimize the printing that they are doing by ganging jobs for different customers or different products for the same customer onto a single sheet and then printing from there.
    • We have an example of that on the lower right. That is actually an example from a Komori press where they have ganged together a bunch of different things to show that it can be done to really optimize the paper usage. Today that is something that a lot of printers like to do because it helps them optimize their own workflows, their throughput, and to print at a better cost of goods sold.
    • [00:07:08] Ryan McAbee: That is absolutely right. You have whatever size sheet that you are going to run through the press, and in many cases, it requires some form of what we call imposition. That is how you arrange the artwork and the pages to make whatever final product you are trying to create.
    • A classic example of that - and you see a little bit of it here in the picture, is if you had to run business cards from 500 different people. You are still running the same 500 quantity for everybody. That is an ideal situation to go ahead and gang it or put it all on one sheet or multiple press sheets to optimize it so that you can do a couple of things: it minimizes your paper usage or maximizes it if you want to think of it that way, and it also minimizes your labor and cost efforts for actually running the jobs through the press. So, it is really smart.
    • [00:07:49] Pat McGrew: In all of these technologies that we have been talking about, there are things that they really excel at, and there are considerations that you want to have in the back of your mind as you are approaching spec'ing a print job.
    • We typically think of offset for the highest quality applications. It is a similar story to things we talked about around flexo and gravure. We talk about these sorts of mechanical operations, these analog operations, as producing some of the highest quality work that is in the marketplace.
    • But offset is really interesting because it is so versatile. You have so many different substrates you can print on. The presses themselves come in a lot of different sizes. The very first offset press I ever worked with was an 18-inch wide offset press that literally fit in a back room at a shop where I was working. Right across the wall was a giant newspaper press. But they do come a lot of different ways. 
    • [00:08:41] Ryan McAbee: What you are referring to is almost what we see on the format size for the digital presses these days, which is that kind of A3+ kind of format.
    • In the offset world, those have been around for a long time and they were called duplicators - the name that was given to those offset presses. Nonetheless, they are offset presses. It is definitely good for anything that requires very crisp detail, very sharp detail. Small font, small text  - that is all great in offset. The only thing that is really not great is it cannot really do full variable data. 
    • Now you can put an inkjet print head on and do some overprinting in line if you want to for addresses and things like that. If you are wanting to replace images and personalize every single piece that is going through the technology, offset just simply cannot do that.
    • The only other kind of consideration I would say that it is more difficult to do with offset printing is if it is a very small quantity. You either are going to have to gang them into one single job, or it is probably better suited to go to some kind of digital printing technology. It just becomes too costly to do all the processes required for offset if it is that super small quantity.
    • Generally speaking, it varies by shop and by equipment mix and so forth, but usually, anything under a few thousand is probably going to be more optimized on a digital piece of equipment versus offset and vice versa. 
    • [00:09:48] Pat McGrew: You brought up something that we did not actually show a picture of, but you can have hybrid offset presses.
    • Just like you can have the hybrid flexo presses and most of these technologies. Typically you would find that with inkjet heads being hung off the end, as we mentioned before. That is a way that some organizations, especially direct mailers, dip their toes into variable data  - by hooking an inkjet head onto the back end of their traditional offset equipment to allow them to do the addressing.
    • A lot of them also use it to change offers. You get a 50% discount. I get a 60% discount, whatever. 
    • If we jump over the other side of the page and start looking at the considerations - there is a reality around an offset press. It is a complex piece of machinery, even if you are talking even at the duplicator level. But if you are talking all the way up to the room-size presses, these are complex machines that require pretty highly skilled people to run them. 
    • [00:10:40] Ryan McAbee: It takes me back because one of the equipment manufacturers actually had an animated video kind of promotional piece at one point. They had gone through it, and they had basically used the analogy that it is like a big chemistry set that is going on every time you run it. It has literally over a thousand unique, discrete steps required to get to the end result. Because of that, the equipment manufacturers have also tried to bring technology into play, so it is much more automated, much easier, and user-friendly than it was in the past, where it really was an art form more than a kind of mechanical skill set. 
    • Today the real consideration for a print shop owner or anybody that is working there is that it is harder to find those press operators in many cases just from the labor market. It is also that they are going to be paid at a higher rate than someone that is on maybe a digital piece of equipment. So there are definitely those considerations, Pat. 
    • [00:11:28] Pat McGrew: And in addition to those very real considerations about skill levels, the cost, the investment that you make into these devices is pretty massive as well.
    • We often say in the digital equipment world that we were used to replacing machines on a five-year cadence because that is what the leases were. You do not do that with an offset press. 
    • [00:11:48] Ryan McAbee: Traditionally, no. If you walk into a commercial printer these days, it is very common that you find presses that date back 50+ years.
    • There will be letterpresses that are in there, the windmill type that is not offset, but the same thing is true with offset. They last for a very long time as long as you do the maintenance for them. But that is slowly changing in our industry, too, because they are starting to see equipment manufacturers go to more of a subscription model, even for the printing equipment. Like the digital vendors have done, where they will wrap the consumables, they will wrap the service, and they will wrap the software into it. This is your subscription to have all this to support an offset press.
    • So it is an interesting change that we have seen recently. 
    • [00:12:21] Pat McGrew: It is going to be interesting to watch the next ten years in technology because what everybody is waiting for is the green button offset press, right? 
    • [00:12:29] Ryan McAbee: I think we are the green button overall. 
    • [00:12:31] Pat McGrew: Yeah, that is probably true. So these are devices that have a large physical footprint. They have power consumption requirements. Very often, you have to worry about your venting requirements and also waste and cleanup requirements. It is not unique to offset printing. You have the same challenges in gravure and flexo, and even digital equipment is not immune from these requirements. Certainly, things you want to consider as you are looking to either bring your first offset equipment in or even if you are looking to upgrade because your requirements might be different when you move to a new device.
    • [00:13:02] Ryan McAbee: You brought up a great point there that we really haven't touched on to this point. I said it was an analogy to the chemistry set, and that is true. You need a lot of chemistry and chemicals that are used in the cleanup process of being able to do the job changeovers and the makeready and so forth. Absolutely there is that component to that, that factors into the cost. 
    • [00:13:18] Pat McGrew: 
    • We have toured the world of offset lithography. Thanks so much for bringing your experience to the table, because you have spent more time in those print shops than I have. We hope you will come back for another episode of The Print University and learn more with us.

06- Print 101: Inkjet

Learn about one of the most dynamic and evolving parts of digital printing in graphic arts — inkjet. The session explains the two major types of inkjet printhead technology before diving into the wide range of equipment, applications, and use cases.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi there. I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am here with my partner in crime, Ryan McAbee, from Pixel Dot Consulting. We are here for another episode of The Print University. This time we have one of my favorite topics to talk to you about. It is. Yes, it is inkjet. Inkjet is fun because it is one of those technologies that does not immediately jump to mind as its own technology.
    • We touch so many things every day that are printed with inkjet that we often do not realize it. It might be a book that you are reading. It might be a billing statement that came in the mail, right? It might be your insurance policy documents - very often printed with inkjet. It also could be the expiration date on a container of yogurt or a bottle cap.
    • All of these things can be done with inkjet printing because, as Ryan and I have talked about among ourselves, inkjet is everything. It can touch almost anything because it is a combination of two technologies that are infinitely changeable and moldable. 
    • Inkjet printing heads - the technology itself goes back hundreds of years. People were not doing high-speed inkjet a hundred years ago. But, the concept that you could heat a liquid and have that heated liquid push itself through a little hole to leave a mark on something - on a piece of paper or a piece of leather or a piece of vellum - that technology has been around for a long time. The early days of inkjet printing in an industrial context - it has been around for almost a hundred years. What has happened in that intervening time is that we have gotten better and better about the ink that we make. We have gotten better and better with inkjet head technology. 
    • We have actually created several different kinds of technologies to allow the ink to go through the head. We have done it in such a way that we are now able to create tinier and tinier ink droplets that allow us to print more precisely and create work that is much more pleasing to look at both graphically and in terms of text. We have created technology that allows us to either print entire pages at a time or use movable heads, what they call scanning heads, move back and forth to create very wide format types of inkjet printing. 
    • Again the ink itself sometimes has 99.9% water and some pigment or dye. Sometimes it is solvent based. There are UV-based inks. My gosh, ink technology is a lot of fun. 
    • [00:02:59] Ryan McAbee: It is a hard one to put a box around because, and we will get into the applications, and what you can actually produce with it. The equipment itself to do that production is so varied. At the end of the day, it is all about flexibility and having purpose-built equipment with a purpose-built set of inks to go on to whatever you are actually printing on. 
    • I think the secret sauce to inkjet is that it is not only the inkjet head and technology, but it is coupling it with the right type of ink for whatever you are actually trying to do on the print.
    • [00:03:30] Pat McGrew: Then, for me, it is also the paper transport technology. Inkjet comes, in my mind, in two big divisions. There are industrial inkjet applications where someone might buy an inkjet head. They might be an integrator; they might be an OEM. They buy an inkjet head, and they make design decisions about how they are going to place that head. If they are going to put lots of them together to try and create an output environment, or they just do one at a time, and they offset them. Are they going to hang them on the back of an offset press? There are a lot of different decisions you can make. 
    • Those industrial heads come in teeny tiny sizes, and they go up to very large sizes, very wide widths that can be integrated into environments. They always have to be prepared with something that will transport whatever it is they are going to print on past the head, or they have to have a way for the head to pass over the thing they are trying to mark on.
    • So industrial inkjet printing is this amazing art form. It is a little bit of art, it is a little bit of science, it is a little bit of magic, and it is cool, but it is not for the faint of heart. 
    • Then there is this whole other path of what I think of as production inkjet printing. Production inkjet printing is mostly what you are seeing on the screen. You can have inkjet for documents. Most of the inkjet that is in the market today is web. There are a growing number of cut-sheet entries in the marketplace. The initial push into document and book printing with inkjet was done on the web-fed platforms. It was very controllable. It also allowed for speed. It allowed for different-length sheets to be printed on the same devices and have the cuts handled by the finishing equipment. There is a lot of sheet-based printing in the world, and we knew that the inkjet manufacturers would eventually crack the code to getting inkjet and sheet-fed devices to work together. 
    • The challenge is that you still need a paper transport to move the sheets. You need to be able to print. You need to be able to dry. You need to make sure that the ink that you are using on the substrate that you are using like each other. If they do not, you get a lot of ink transfer to the next page that lands on top of it. You will see the transfer. You can get bleed through the paper. There are all sorts of terrible things that can happen. In the production space, we have pretty much figured out how to do that. 
    • If you go all the way to the right and you look at inkjet for signage, that is a whole other ballgame.
    • And Ryan, it is one of those areas we like a lot. 
    • [00:06:20] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, it is. It is always pushing the boundaries. What you can do and what you can create with it. To circle back and give a visual to some of these things. Industrial inkjet, like Pat was talking about, a good example of that is actually ceramic tile. Most of that today is being printed with inkjet technology. That is more of an industrial application, which we do not have pictured here.
    • Then on the left-hand side here, with all this inkjet equipment for document-based printing, you can do things like books, transactional work, even general kind of commercial work, whereas flyers, brochures, that sort of thing can be done.
    • Then in the middle, you have these hybrid presses, which we have talked about in several different episodes, which basically merge analog printing technology with the benefits of digital. Here we have some heads mounted on probably an offset press, and then some basically a unit attached to a flexography for us.
    • Then on the right, it is this wild expanding area for signage, and you can really print on so many different types of materials and thicknesses of materials. With some of these flatbed, inkjet printers for signage, you can print on, complete doors. Like doors in your room. 
    • [00:07:20] Pat McGrew: I actually have seen a sample of printing on a cinder block. 
    • [00:07:24] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. I mean, just about anything. Print on everything. 
    • [00:07:28] Pat McGrew: It is. The other thing to remember about all of this is that in the early days of inkjet, it had a terrible reputation for image quality and resolution. In the early days of these production presses that you see pictured, the resolution was not that high. Even at 300 DPI, the image quality was not fabulous. We used to call it business color. It was okay for transaction statements, but you would not use it for a book or for commercial printing.
    • But welcome to the new era. Today most of these devices are printing at 600 DPI or higher. They are printing fast. They are printing with ink technology that gives a lot of vibrance. Some of these inkjet devices can work with primers that go down ahead of the print so that all the ink stays on top and stays really bright.
    • Today you might see coffee table books. Printed with inkjet technology, which ten years ago we would have never done. It would have absolutely not happened.
    • At the same time, all that development has been going on over on the wide format side. Those devices today, in addition to printing on the really thick stuff and the cinder block, which was my favorite, they are also doing a lot of textile printing as well.
    • You get textile presses. You will get presses like these that people will print whole bolts of fabric on, which are just absolutely killer. Then the other thing that you will get is people who are using some of the narrower format presses to print outfits. Using specialized software, the sleeve and the arm and the collars and all these things, they actually impose them onto the file in such a way that when they print, the receiver of that piece of cloth can now cut everything out, sew it together and go. 
    • We have not figured out how to automate the sewing of a hundred percent of the outfits. The interesting thing is if you are a printer and you own wide format equipment, and you have been using it for sign and display. It is worth investigating opportunities to also print fabrics, curtains, shower curtains, and all sorts of things that are now in this category of personalized, interior design-oriented print.
    • Inkjet is just everywhere, no matter how you look at it. 
    • [00:09:43] Ryan McAbee: Pat, as you were talking there, what struck me is that when it comes to inkjet equipment and inkjet technology, It is really a disruptor to every other print technology that already existed because you can do so many of those same applications that these other print technologies have been doing for years. You can do it in a different way with variables. You can do it in a different way in terms of your materials and substrates. 
    • Packaging is an example. It is an application set that we really had not talked much about for inkjet yet. Traditionally that has been the world of either gravure or flexography. Now you can do shorter runs, whether it is flexible packaging or pouches or corrugated or even shipping boxes and containers. You can do all that with inkjet because they have been able to figure out the formulations and figure out how to make it wide enough. All these pieces have come together to really unlock inkjet for just about any kind of thing you can imagine in terms of printing.
    • [00:10:40] Pat McGrew: If you look at the largest packaging converters in the world today, most of them own at least one, if not more, digital device that they use to accomplish their shorter run, more bespoke packaging requirements.
    • There are organizations that are pure digital packaging providers - corrugated and folding cartons. That is an area you are absolutely right about. It has exploded, and the growth seems to be playing hockey stick games. It is just going crazy. At the same time, with all that is happening in the digital corrugated, folding carton, and label space, there is still a lot of innovation going on around inkjet technology in the traditional areas that we talk about in the business and promotional and publishing areas.
    • Not only has the range of paper substrates that you can use just exploded. I can remember when I started in high-speed inkjet, and we had three kinds of paper we could use. If you did not like those, you were not going to be printing on inkjet because we only had three, and two of them had to come from Europe. It was just absolutely crazy because the formulation of the paper does make a difference. It is what allows the ink to stick to the paper, then actually dry and become a finalized product. 
    • Today there are dozens and dozens of substrates that are designed for either inkjet printing or more hybrid uses. A lot of organizations that have both inkjet capability and offset capability are buying stock from the paper merchants that are certified for both offset and inkjet print. 
    • That just means there is so much to a printing company. Now say they get a job for a hundred million of this six-panel piece here on the bottom. They are going to put that on one of their big offset presses, but then the customer goes, "Oops, a hundred thousand short." They are probably not going to want to mount the plates back up and disrupt longer jobs to do that. Now they can reliably take that same file and put it onto an inkjet device and get very good quality that the customer will accept.
    • We have tons and tons of evidence of this. It allows the printing company to make the best decision about which device to put it on as a late binding decision based on their scheduling needs, as well as, being aware of the cost difference. 
    • [00:13:12] Ryan McAbee: The brand or customer could say, I need a thousand of these, but I need a seasonal change for whatever I am trying to market. It does offer you a lot of flexibility to have analog and digital in parallel. 
    • One of the things that we have not talked about in terms of inkjet, I think the thing that is so attractive and the thing that is the growth opportunity for inkjet across the board is not its diversity, but that it is a completely different cost model, isn't it? 
    • [00:13:34] Pat McGrew: It is. First of all, most inkjet equipment does not come with a click charge the way most EP-based equipment does. Most of the costs are based on the cost of the ink plus your cost of paper. You typically have a maintenance contract, a service contract that covers the maintenance of your device. Large operations may choose the absolute lowest level of the maintenance contract so that they actually learn how to do all the maintenance themselves on a lot of these devices. There are a lot of self-serve aspects. One of the things we started to see was the rise of the augmented reality, virtual reality approach to service and maintenance on inkjet devices. You hold your phone up, and the person on the other end talks you through the things you need to do.
    • The other thing about the cost model that you always need to be aware of when it comes to inkjet is that it is more than the ink and the paper and your labor costs and your maintenance costs. A lot of these machines also have flushing requirements. You may actually have to, on a regular cadence, flush some additional solvents through to keep the heads clean. You need to be watching the costs of those fluids because it adds up. It is something that you actually have to dispose of properly. There are costs associated with that. There are a lot of different elements that go into the cost model. 
    • One of the biggest holy grails in inkjet printing is having an ink estimator, right? A magic wand that tells you exactly what this print will cost. In the early days of ink estimators, it tended to be a spreadsheet and a lot of guessing. Today a lot of the more sophisticated ink estimators that vendors are providing and some third parties are providing actually do things like weigh the ink before and after print jobs or at least are aware of the ink levels and can rope that in and give you a feedback loop. Here is how much ink we thought it was going to take to print this job. Here is how much ink it actually took to print this job. Here is what our real cost is. Then feed those numbers back into the quoting and estimating system so that, over time, you become more precise in your actual cost model.
    • [00:15:42] Ryan McAbee: When we are talking about applications here. The other thing that is an advantage may be outside of the cost model. For certain types of printing that are using inkjet technologies, it actually becomes a much simpler and greener process in many cases. I know you talked about textiles - the same thing I know applied to ceramics - that is why so much it has transitioned to inkjet because it is just a cleaner way of doing it. I do not know if you can speak to anything about how that has really improved the process from a textile perspective. 
    • [00:16:08] Pat McGrew: One of the interesting things happening in textile production is happening at several layers inside the textile printing business. Traditionally textile printing and dying have been done in the Far East. It has been a very manual process. A very ecologically unfriendly process involving a lot of chemicals. 
    • [00:16:28] Ryan McAbee: A lot of water usage, too, right? 
    • [00:16:30] Pat McGrew: A tremendous amount of water, both as part of the dying process and then the cleanup process between colors. An interesting thing that has been happening over the last five or six years is the rise of inkjet printing of fabrics. Again, much friendlier because you are tending to use inks. Even these are very durable inks. They are very washable inks, but they are also friendlier inks. The process is very precise, so you don't have a lot of waste. You are only printing what you need, so you're not throwing away vats of stuff because you made too much for a specific color. 
    • The other funny thing that has been happening is that there is now technology from a couple of different companies that are actually dying the yarn that goes into weaving the textiles themselves. The fabric itself. In those cases, what's so interesting is that they are using the digital technology and color management technology that we know from pre-press in all of the forms of printing that we know. They are using that to inform digital dying of yarn. Just what you need when you need it. 
    • Imagine that you are in a loom someplace where they are actually weaving all the fabric that goes into your shirt. They run out of that specific color, that dye lot, at the last minute, and they can not finish the order. What traditionally happened is it would take months for them to actually get more of that yarn back in - that thread back in. Now they could actually put one of these digital yarn-dyeing machines next to the process and just dye what they need to finish off this particular project. Then cut it off and go to the next color when they need it. It also makes it possible to print the thread in gradients because the color is digitally controlled, which is not something that you can do using traditional dyeing methods.
    • All of these things are much greener because you are not dealing with the waste. You are not dealing with the cleanup of the solvents that are involved in it. It is something that we think will actually greatly influence fashion going forward. A lot of fast fashion today, which the millennials and GenZ buy today and then sell. is actually being produced using these technologies.
    • [00:18:51] Ryan McAbee: That makes a lot of sense. To sum it up here, what is inkjet good for, Pat? And I know that is a very broad question that I am leading you into. 
    • [00:19:00] Pat McGrew: I will do Buzz Lightyear here - “It is good for everything…” - because it is. Inkjet technology is very moldable. It can be configured for everything from printing small narrow swatches, printing on bottle caps, or inside of bottle caps, all the way through to building wraps. You can print everything. 
    • Most digital signage is printed with inkjet. That has become the de facto way to print. I have a client I have worked with who prints the banners that hang under helicopters at sporting events. Massive pieces of fabric that he is printing, right? Everything can be printed with inkjet.
    • The thing to remember is that most of these applications for inkjet can also be accomplished with other technologies. There is a cost valuation that you go through to figure out where you should print it and where you should not. 
    • The thing about inkjet is that it is going to keep on changing. It is going to keep on evolving. I can remember when inkjet droplets were giant, and you could actually see them. Now they are so tiny. They are smaller than the head of a needle. 
    • If you look at the technology that is used for inkjet printing, it is the same basic technology that is used for additive manufacturing and 3D printing. There is a lot of impetus to keep the innovation going to allow them to hit droplets faster. To go faster and to become more and more precise at the same time. It is the universal translator of printing technologies. It can do just about anything.
    • [00:20:36] Ryan McAbee: It is really just specific to the use case and applications that you are trying to produce. We gave you a couple of guideposts here, but really these can be argued either way for the most part.
    • [00:20:46] Pat McGrew: I think that you have to understand your use case. Inkjet technology comes in so many forms, from so many vendors, configured in so many ways. There is an inkjet technology for what you do today. It is very likely. Does that mean you should rush out and buy it? It is going to depend on your use case.
    • What is your current cost model? What is your current value proposition to your customers? What is it that you are promising them that you are going to do? Remember that one distinction between toner and inkjet technology is, today, we have not yet mastered the art of metallic inks in inkjet. We have not yet mastered the art of neon inks, although some are available for certain applications, mostly sign display. Same with white ink. We do not really see that on the production side today. It is horses for courses. You have got to really understand what it is you are trying to do and which version of inkjet technology might be the right one for you.
    • [00:21:48] Ryan McAbee: Thank you, Pat, for sharing all your insights, and we hope to see everybody on a future episode of The Print University.

07- Print 101: Gravure

Welcome to the land of long print runs using the analog printing method of gravure. We explain the technology, equipment, applications, and best uses of this big iron print technique.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, welcome to The Print University. I am Pat McGrew from McGrewGroup. This is my good friend Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting. Say Hi!
    • [00:00:09] Ryan McAbee: Hello. 
    • [00:00:10] Pat McGrew: There we go. This time we want to bring you the story of gravure, and it is a term you may not have heard a lot, right Ryan? 
    • [00:00:19] Ryan McAbee: That is right. It is technically rotogravure, but we often shorten it to gravure.
    • It is one of the older printing processes. It is really the hallmark of when you have to print a whole bunch of stuff and still have high quality. You see what is being printed here. It is worth noting that the cylinder up at the top is what is actually receiving the ink that is transferring onto the paper below.
    • [00:00:43] Pat McGrew: It has an interesting technology requirement, right? There is a combination of a lot of different technologies that go into gravure. You have to engrave the roller, which is a process all by itself. Then you are creating an environment where it is doing the same transfer as you mentioned.
    • There are scrapers. Scraper blades. There is a lot of waste in gravure because you are basically putting peanut butter on a sandwich, and then you are scraping part of it off, right? 
    • [00:01:16] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. And there are the anilox rollers; these things are huge. They are heavy. They have mass. They have weight, right? It is not like a single person is just picking this up and loading it into a gravure press. It does not work that way. That is the scale. So one thing just to mention is it is a huge scale here. 
    • The other thing in terms of the engraving on the anilox roller. It is called that because it has all these tiny little cells. The visual I can give is to think of it as tiny little tea cups that hold a little reservoir of ink. Those teacups can be small, medium, or large. They can be different depths, in other words, to hold different amounts of ink. It basically picks up the ink from the fountain or the vat of ink that it is spinning around. Then that doctor blade is  - it has that name for a reason - it is really super sharp. It is going to scrape and put that ink level and top it off at that ink level. Then that is what transfers to the paper. 
    • With gravure, these rollers are expensive to produce, to manufacture, but they last forever. As a matter of fact, Pat, I used to be an intern for a company that cleaned these things, almost like sandblasting in a way, and they would clean out the cells where the ink got dried up and stuck. You could keep just reusing these things over and over again. 
    • [00:02:28] Pat McGrew: If you start to think about things like Bible printing, where the words do not change, right? That is really a perfect example, and as you saw in the video, the money that is in your wallet is printed this way as well. That is pretty impressive. Now, one of the things that you and I were discussing is that you can tell text that has been printed gravure because it has a certain set of identifiable characteristics.
    • [00:02:54] Ryan McAbee: It is jagged. The more technical term is serrated. But if you look, and you can see it with your eye a lot of times actually, if you go really up close to something. Particularly the black text; you will see these little jagged lines around the text when you really look at it up close. You can definitely see it if you magnify under a loupe. That is the hallmark that has been printed with gravure. Again, those little tea cups, you cannot make a perfectly straight edge with a teacup, right? That is what creates those different edges. 
    • [00:03:22] Pat McGrew: That is the picture that you see in the lower right. It is interesting that you can actually tell what it is that printed it by looking at it. You can see those serrated edges. 
    • We talked about the fact that these machines tend to be big. I can remember going to a drupa maybe 25 or more years ago where I was encountering these giant machines out in one of the halls where the analog rollers were like a room wide, it seemed. I can remember one of them they had sitting on its side because it was so tall. When it turned on its side, it would not stand up, and it would not lay down. It was lying diagonally. These machines, you do not trade them out every five years, right? These are long-term investments, and they are technical, but they are fast.
    • [00:04:12] Ryan McAbee: That is the thing that has changed over time - there is still a place for these depending on what type of thing you are trying to print. It truly has to be something that is super high volume. As an example, I believe National Geographic Magazine, when they were at the height of circulation, were actually printing with gravure. Then as circulation declined and they did not have to print as many, they switched to offset and other technologies over time. 
    • Now you are really left with things like money or a candy wrapper. Those kinds of things need super long runs. For scale here, we probably should have put a person in these pictures. They have literally a catwalk or a second floor on parts of these presses. You're literally talking about more than 20 feet in the air, probably from top to bottom.
    • [00:04:56] Pat McGrew: The top one, that ManRoland Goss is three stories tall. Because it has that second catwalk on the top. They are absolutely massive machines. They can be wide. They can be up to 12 feet wide. I have seen bigger ones that are specially built. 
    • With gravure, as you mentioned, candy wrappers are one of those things that, again, use multiple colors and lots of precision in terms of the brand colors used. They usually also have manufacturing marks on them that identify the lot for tracking purposes. Some candy has expiration dates on it. That is where you get into a hybrid approach where you have got your primary gravure press, and then you may have inkjet sitting on the backend that is actually jetting some additional information onto the wrapper.
    • [00:05:43] Ryan McAbee: The unique thing about this process is that it does lend itself more to inline finishing. I mean converting. So you can have the roll because it is typically always roll-fed, coming off the end that is printed. Then it can be spliced or cut so that you have multiple lines going. From there, you can have other processes happening, whether it is cutting, gluing, laminating, or all this other kind of stuff to get to more of a finished piece.  Then, as you said, you could then have the inkjet printing variable data if it is a product that is going to go out and have a shelf life.
    • [00:06:14] Pat McGrew: The inks are very important in the gravure process, right? You want to make sure that you are matching the type of ink to the substrate, and you also need to be able to dry the ink because this is a fast process. You want the fast dry stuff you put on nail polish. Maybe you do not, but the fast, fast dry stuff you put on nail polish, right? You are looking at making sure that you can get things dry, which is a really important element. 
    • Now, we talked a little bit about stuff like candy wrappers, but the range of things that you might be doing with gravure is actually pretty broad.
    • We have not talked about those things like kind of the categories as home décor. We have a picture of flooring, right? It is not just flooring. Cabinets, tiles, there is a whole range of different types of home-based products that are also print gravure because they don't change, right?
    • If you looked really carefully at the cabinets in your kitchen, you might be able to identify the patterns. A friend of ours was in my kitchen a few years ago and started doing the "well that was printed, and that was printed, and that was printed, and your floor was printed, and that was printed." I laugh because I had never thought about it. That is absolutely right.
    • That is just some of what you might do. Wallpaper is, again, something that is most likely to be printed using gravure presses today, although some of that is changing from a more bespoke wallpaper to some digital technologies.
    • So it is a really pretty wide range.
    • [00:07:43] Ryan McAbee: The hallmark is super long runs in high volumes; it really does lend itself well to industrial processes or what we consider more industrial printing. That would be like a laminate flooring kind of example.
    • If you have really high requirements in terms of volumes for packaging, it works equally well for that. So it is diverse. I guess the thing that we keep coming back to gravure is you have to have requirements for a lot of printing.
    • [00:08:08] Pat McGrew: Because it is a big process, right?
    • [00:08:10] Ryan McAbee: Everything is bigger and better, so to speak. 
    • [00:08:13] Pat McGrew: Yeah. You are not going to put it in your garage. That is just not going to happen. Let us run down a little bit of what it's good for, but what you need to think about. Again, the odds that the average printer would decide to get into gravure at this point in time, it would be a big leap for most organizations to go there if they're not already there.
    • It really does have its purpose. It is good for quantity, and it is good for high-quality requirements, and brand requirements, especially. It is great when you need to do in-line finishing and converting. If you are not ready to make that leap yourself, it is never a bad idea to have a partner who does it.
    • This is where some of the trade printers can help you out if you need something. If you have a customer who has this kind of requirement and you do not want to leap into the technology yourself. What are some of the other considerations? 
    • [00:09:02] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, the consideration is definitely footprint. It is a big device. You need a very large warehouse-type setting to put these in. Usually, when I have seen them, they have been in really tall metal manufacturing enclosures requiring, especially if it is running solvent ink, some kind of special ventilation. A lot of electricity pull because of the drying that you mentioned, Pat. The dryers may take even more than normal. 
    • Then, of course, the cost. The cost. We are talking in the millions, easily. And many millions for this kind of equipment. It's not only the capital investment, but it is also the cost required for each job because you do have to do the engraving. You do have more of a setup functionality for these presses. Probably has the longest setup time of any of the analog printing processes, actually. Then you also do have a bit of waste of material that you have to include in your costing model, too, because, again, these things run at such speed. By the time you get going, and let's say you had a web break or something like that is just so many feet of material that is going to be not used at that point. Those are all considerations 
    • [00:10:04] Pat McGrew: And because we are, as a society, generally using less print. The need for these exceptionally long runs are migrating away from things like book requirements and what we think of as commercial print requirements and migrating in the direction of things like home décor, flooring, and wallpaper. It is something you would consider really carefully before you made that investment.
    • Ryan, I am so glad that you had a lot more experience with gravure because I think that gave us a really good understanding of what it takes to live with it. Any last thoughts on gravure? 
    • [00:10:38] Ryan McAbee: The only thought is that over time, what has happened has taken a little bit of gravure. We obviously talked about the trends of smaller runs as an industry. Other technologies, particularly flexography, have filled some of that void, especially in the lower quantity range. You can get a very similar kind of print, and flexo has improved in print quality, so you can get a similar impact when it comes to tens of thousands of runs and not millions of runs. That is another consideration for gravure as we sit here today. 
    • Other than that, Pat, I think it is thank you for joining us on this episode. Thank everybody for being with us, and we hope to see you in a future episode.

08- Print 101: Flexography

Flexography is a fitting name since it is a flexible technology capable of printing on boxes, labels, and more. We discuss the technology of this analog printing technology, the range of equipment, applications, and uses.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello,  and welcome to The Print University. I am joined by Pat McGrew, the McGrewGroup today. Hello, Pat. 
    • [00:00:07] Pat McGrew: Hey there. 
    • [00:00:09] Ryan McAbee: And, this is Ryan with Pixel Dot Consulting. We are here to talk to you about flexography or, more commonly, shortened to flexo printing. What is flexo all about? How does it actually work as a technology?
    • [00:00:21] Pat McGrew: It is like a rubber stamp, but it is faster. It prints on a wider variety of materials, more reliably. It is more automated than taking your stamp and hitting a pad and hitting a piece of paper. It is a really interesting technology because it is very identifiable. If you listen to our module on gravure, you know that there are certain characteristics in the text that let you identify gravure print. Flexo has the same thing. If you look carefully - get out your loup -  you can often see a little halo around the text. Professionals will use that to identify something that has been printed using flexo. 
    • It is a multiple-cylinder ink transfer process. It is a complex machine, right? It is not just one roller. It does use some of the similar technologies that you will hear us talk about in the other analog modules where there are these anilox rollers, and they contain microcells. Those cells are how the ink transfers onto the final substrate.
    • Like a lot of other processes, it can be combined with digital technology to create really interesting bespoke pieces where every piece is different. Think of candy wrappers. Think of pouches, where they need expiry dates, and they need manufacturing dates, and lot numbers. It is an interesting technology that provides really durable output. One of the things we know about flexo-printed pieces is they will not rub off. They will not break. They will not crack. When they are produced correctly, they have a really long lifespan, which is why they are perfect for things that will appear on store shelves. 
    • [00:02:04] Ryan McAbee: It is a flexible technology, no pun intended. Next time you are in a store, and you are going down the snack aisle, and you see that bag of potato chips, of crisps, pick it up. You can see it with your naked eye. You can literally look at the brand text, and you will see that rubber-stamped halo effect that Pat was talking about. 
    • This is exactly one of the use cases or applications that can be printed with flexo. I guess the other hallmark of flexo that we really did not touch on yet is the fact that it has a different type of substrate range than almost any of the other printing technologies. The reason for that is that it does not really require heat because of the type of ink formulations that are used. There does not have to be heat in the process. You can use very thin plastic-type films that otherwise would melt in other print processes.
    • You can even start layering substrates together in the process to get different kinds, particularly for flexible pouches and packaging, where you have different dynamics. Maybe you want one to be a metallic look, and you do white and overprints on that to get some color into it. Then you want other protected barriers of a film because maybe it is storing food instead of laundry detergents. All that kind of thing is also possible with flexo. 
    • [00:03:13] Pat McGrew: The interesting thing about flexography is the fact that it does not require the heat that a lot of the other processes do - these machines come in all sizes. You can find one that will literally fit in your office. I have actually seen where a company is expanding a little bit, and they are trying to find some room.
    • They want to do a little bit of flexo labels, so they buy one of the smaller format flexo label devices. It does not require a lot of additional piping, heating, or venting. It typically can fit in a kind of reasonable environment. They do go all the way to the giant economy model. This is a wide web example that we see here.
    • So what are some of the common configurations that you see with flexo? 
    • [00:03:57] Ryan McAbee: There are two buckets. There are the ones that are considered narrow, web for labeling in many cases. Then you get up to the wide web, which is the bigger supersize kind of equipment here.
    • More recently, I guess in the past four-plus years; you have even had different technologies applied for even the label space. As an example, you have electrophotography that is being used for some label devices, like the one pictured in the bottom left. That is something that definitely you could put in almost an office-type environment. It is very good for maybe micro brands that do not need millions of labels but are just making their product and selling it into a local or regional market. 
    • [00:04:32] Pat McGrew: A lot of wineries do that.
    • [00:04:33] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. And then you get into more of the pure flexo equipment. That is what we think about. You can use a pretty diverse set of inks. You can have a diverse set of substrates in terms of clear materials, opaque materials, thin materials, and sticker materials. All different sorts.
    • Then the one thing we do not have pictured on this particular slide is a hybrid configuration, too - where you take flexo - the analog process - then you bolt on at some point a digital inkjet printing method, where you could have the best of the analog, but then add the variable component that you can do with inkjet too.
    • So a lot of range here. 
    • [00:05:10] Pat McGrew: One of the things we often see in the flexo space is that there are requirements for very specific brand colors. It is very often not a CMYK process, but it is a set of very specific brand colors that are being used to build the image that is finally being printed. 
    • [00:05:28] Ryan McAbee: That is absolutely correct. You are only limited by how many printing stations or ink stations you have. Another thing that we did not picture on the previous slide is that there are a couple of base configurations for flexo equipment. You have inline, which is what is pictured at the top here. There are also smaller, more compact units that have what is known as a central impression unit, where you have different ink stations along the impression cylinder.
    • [00:05:51] Pat McGrew: And they go around. Yeah. This is what we were talking about before. 
    • Let's talk a little bit about the applications.
    • It is everything on your grocery shelves, right? It can be cereal boxes; it can be the labels for cans and bottles and wine. It can be the stuff that you pick up at the auto parts store. There is this growing universe of flexography that is also being applied to short-run folding carton-type boxes. 
    • The technology footprint is available in a size that a lot of mid-tier printers can actually access and put on their floor, and create a whole new set of products that it is possible for them to put out. This far-left one that says Fantastic Pack on it. That is a company out of the northwest in the US. You find that a lot of the label printers who traditionally used big format machines have also invested in some of the smaller hybrid machines to allow them to take on more customized work, more personalized work. Today there are companies all over the world that are doing a lot of this work using hybrid equipment to create micro runs, as you mentioned before.
    • I think that from an application perspective if you are a brand owner, it is important to know that these technologies exist. 
    • [00:07:08] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. Flexo definitely fits squarely in that kind of packaging bucket. Here we have three of the main ones listed and including bags.
    • The other thing with flexo is that, over the years, it has greatly improved its actual print quality. That is a big transition or development that happens over time to where you are hard-pressed sometimes to figure out if this printed with an offset or a flexo. Again, if you look very closely at the tag, it might be minute.
    • [00:07:35] Pat McGrew: Let's see that halo.
    • Let's go beyond the equipment and the applications, and let's talk about what it is good for and what some of the considerations are. It is good for packaging. The technology lends itself to that. It can print on really thin substrates that do not have to be pulp-based.
    • It can be plastic. You can print on anything that you can get to go through the machine. Ryan, is it a high-quantity kind of technology in its best use and its most efficient use? 
    • [00:08:04] Ryan McAbee: It scales, really. You can do lower runs. Particularly we talked about the electrophotography-based label printer that can definitely do very small runs. It really depends on the equipment, but it can scale in both ways. Usually, it is not going to be effective for millions of runs. You probably switch over to a process like gravure at that point. You would have to do multiple plates, and multiple runs with multiple sets of plates to get to those really high quantities. 
    • The thing that we did not mention that it is really good for is that it can be part of a manufacturing line. I have actually been in a facility where they were printing flexo films for, guess what, turkey bags. Your frozen turkey that you get for the holiday. It was all done in line. All interesting manufacturing cases that you can do with flexo as well. 
    • [00:08:47] Pat McGrew: That is really interesting. We had mentioned that we are starting to see a little bit of a crossover in the applications, especially at the lower end. Some of the new digital technologies are moving into a space that was traditionally occupied by true flexo devices.
    • Today, more and more, you are seeing commercial use of toner-based pouch printing and label printing. A lot of the manufacturers have solutions in that space. A lot of the traditional digital print manufacturers are in that space. 
    • The quality is great. The colors are great. The file preparation is the same because you are going to do color management with some device link specificity. If you are a printing organization that is growing in new directions and you are trying to decide... Do I buy another flexo device, or do I buy a digital device that can accomplish some of the same work?  - a lot of shops are looking to augment their pure flexography technologies with some digital flexo technologies to allow them to do shorter runs more cost-efficiently. It is certainly something that you would want to become familiar with - the differences in the substrates that they can handle and the differences in how they handle color.
    • A flexo machine requires a skilled operator. Do you get the sense that a digital device requires that same level of skill?
    • [00:10:08] Ryan McAbee: I do not; they are different. it is not to say that both do not require some level of skill. It is just that when you are talking about any analog printing process, it usually requires a notch above in experience.
    • That is why you have the classic system has been apprentice or journeyman evolving into the full press kind of operator. The reason is that it is a little bit of art and science, getting the ink and the paper working well together. In terms of densities and whatever else kind of things that you may do to physically run the equipment. There is still a little bit of a gap there. They both require some level of skill set. Particularly if you are going to entrust that with any kind of brand work. There has to be a minimum level of quality that you are outputting at the end.
    •  
    • [00:10:49] Pat McGrew: Ryan, let's talk about recyclability. How recyclable is this material?
    • [00:10:54] Ryan McAbee: It just depends on the substrate and, to some extent, the ink choice that's actually being used too.
    • If you are doing corrugated, as an example, it is highly recyclable and has a high recycling rate in most countries. When it comes to the films, though, for flexible packaging, that kind of depends on the actual str, the chemical makeup of that plastic. Is it polyethylene? Is it something else? What your local to in any given area, what you actually can put into the recycling stream to begin with. It is a big question mark that has to be figured out. 
    • [00:11:26] Pat McGrew: It is something you need to work with your customers on as well. Some customers have very specific recyclability requirements, where others may not be as concerned about it. It depends on the nature of the product and what country they are selling it in. That is also a big factor these days as well. Ryan, thanks so much for helping us understand flexography. it is an area that I am just always fascinated by because of the range of things that you can print with it. 
    • We hope that you will come back for another edition of the Print University and learn more with us about all these great printing technologies.

09- Print 101: Screen Printing

In the introduction to screen printing, we review the technology, equipment, applications, and uses. Screen printing is not just for printing t-shirts!

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and with me, as always, is Ryan McAbee, Pixel Dot Consulting. Together we are The Print University, and we are today coming to you with a really interesting technology, Ryan. It is one that is almost ancient in terms of being a technology. It is called screen printing. It is exactly what it sounds like in that you are building up an image through a screen. We know it from years and years of really cool t-shirts. If you have ever bought a t-shirt from a concert, the odds are that it was done with screen printing technology because it is durable. 
    • It does all the things you want. You have a lot of really brilliant colors, but it is not just for t-shirts. Screen printing is used for all sorts of things. So what is the magic behind screen printing? 
    • [00:00:48] Ryan McAbee: Let's just dive into how it technically works, and that will give us a basis for looking at it further.
    • You have a mesh screen -  so interlocking, woven squares - you are literally pushing ink with a flexible squeegee through the screen and onto whatever carrier you have below. It could be a fabric, like a t-shirt, or it could be some other kind of thing, maybe even a metal sign, or whatever other kind of material you are going to print on.
    • It is highly durable. It is usually done with different kinds of ink that are thick in nature. You can literally rub your hand across it; it is a raised ink film layer. There are a lot of variables to it too. It used to be originally called silk screening, and you may still hear that terminology.
    • It can do really fine lines, so you can get these really tight woven screens. Of course, that presents challenges of getting the ink through it, the finer you make that screen, but it can be done. 
    • [00:01:32] Pat McGrew: You get your muscles right? One of the interesting things about the technology is that it can be a very manual printing technology, and in many places, it still is. For some of that silk screening type work, there are graphic artists who specialize in creating their art using screen technology. You can find people who really are building up their shoulder muscles with that squeegee, really getting it through. 
    • Then there are also machines that will handle the bulk of the hard work. They can be at different levels as well. They can be extremely fine, as you see with silk screening, up to larger format screens that are used for some more common things like t-shirts and home decor, and even other types of apparel printing.
    • [00:02:13] Ryan McAbee: That is true. You do see all of that type of work. This space has not seen as much digitization and automation as the other print spaces. It is the fact that you have to make a screen. You have to have a photo emulsion layer where you actually expose the area that is going to receive the ink, and then you wash it out with water to make that gap for the ink to go through. You can only bring so much automation to it, but as you said, for some of that squeegee action, there is also rotary screen technology which works in a slightly different way. We have seen some pneumatics and some automation come into that space.
    • It is an interesting area. It still exists because, in terms of printing something that is going to really last, it has a lot of advantages like UV light exposure or different abrasive chemicals. It just depends on what the application is, but this is how it technically works in terms of getting the ink onto the substrate.
    • [00:02:57] Pat McGrew: It is probably worth noting as we are talking about the equipment. This is one of those technologies similar to offset where every color is its own plate, effectively. The analogy is that you have a screen per color. That becomes part of the challenge of not only manually if you are doing it by hand, making sure everything is registered, so you get exactly the image that you want with the right edges that you want. Also, for the equipment that might be in place, there is also that requirement to make sure that all the screens are registered, so everything builds up just the way you want. 
    • [00:03:30] Ryan McAbee: Something like the manual garment press is pictured on the left. That is where you obviously have one color per station, and it takes that manual eye and kind of operator experience to line that up in terms of registration to make sure the final print is going to look like you expected it to look. Then you have more automated things like you see with the red press picture there, all the way to the even more automated cylinder or rotary screen printing that you see below. That might be used for wallpaper or some other kind of thing.
    • What is interesting to me, though, about screen printing is that the digital side of inkjet has made a lot of inroads into the applications that would have traditionally been done by screen printing. Think of direct-to-garment -  so if it is not screen printed, your t-shirt may be printed digitally with inkjet.
    • The same thing is true for wall coverings and wallpaper. They might be done with a different technology, like latex or whatever kind of method. It is interesting that there is a segment, a portion of this volume of work, that would have traditionally been done with screen printing that has probably migrated to other inkjet-based technology.
    • [00:04:21] Pat McGrew: It makes a lot of sense. But for those pieces of the print industry that still are doing a fair amount of screen printing, they have been able to apply some technologies to it to help the speed and make things a little bit more efficient. I think it is a dying art, though, right? So labor is an issue in screen printing if you are at the manual end of the process; right now, a lot of organizations do look towards those digital alternatives. The direct-to-garment presses and the latex presses are the way to move forward because they can be automated to a higher degree than a lot of the sort of lower-end, like the t-shirt presses people have used in the past. The price points on them are fairly nice, and you do not get all the waste. 
    • One thing about screen printing is, as you mentioned before, the ink is very thick. It is almost gelatinous. There is a lot of cleanup involved after you print. So for organizations that are looking to get away from those labor-intensive aspects, moving to digital solutions can be good.
    • [00:05:17] Ryan McAbee: We have talked about analog to digital conversion as the tagline, but it applies to all printing segments. It is very similar here in the fact that we are comparing screen print with some of the inkjet technologies. This is an analog print technology, so you do have those extra steps for preparation before you can even get to the start of the printing.
    • As you said, there is a lot of chemistry involved along the way and a lot of water use involved in the screen preparation step. Those pieces get taken out or removed as process steps as you move digitally into some other kind of format. This transition happened before. What we also know from those transitions, if we were comparing digital printing versus analog commercial lithography printing, is that those two technologies still remain. They both have use cases in the marketplace. It is not like this is going to go away as a market size.
    • If history taught us anything, it is that they will coexist and figure out how to blend together. I think that is what we are seeing here too. In terms of cool stuff that you can print with screen printing, run us through some you have seen some examples of and where it makes sense to still do this as screen print. 
    • [00:06:14] Pat McGrew: We have talked about t-shirts, and we have talked about things like home decor. You mentioned wallpaper. Certainly, wallpaper is an area where we have seen a lot of screen printing traditionally. Signage, in a lot of cases, in order to get really durable print that can live through heat, wind, or living in a chemically intense environment where a lot of solvents are being used - screen printing is still a favorite for people who produce signs in those kinds of spaces.
    • We tend to think about print in terms of fabrics and garments and even promotional things like drink wear and key chains. But do not forget about printed electronics, because that is another area where screen printing has traditionally been used to form fine lines using substrates that are magnetic or electronic and can conduct electricity. Those are areas as well.
    • Bottling is one of those areas that I think is also going through one of those transitions. We have seen a lot of screen printing for fine wine bottles and alcohol bottles, and perfume bottles and direct to the glass of the bottle. Because digital technologies are now becoming appropriate in that space, we are seeing some of the conversion happen there.
    • I always come back to fine art and the artistic aspects of print. And in those cases, screen printing does, as you mentioned, have a long life ahead of it. It will not disappear because there are certain looks that you get from a screen-printed piece that you do not get from a digitally-printed piece.
    • It is the difference between looking at a film shot digitally versus one shot on film. There are a bunch of directors out there that have gone back to making their major motion pictures on film because they just look different, and you cannot put your finger on why. Screen printing is the same way.
    • [00:07:53] Ryan McAbee: I think you are right. There is definitely that aspect of it that will still keep it going. There are probably industrial applications where it makes sense that will continue to be in that space for years to come too. I think of all these kinds of labels that we see on the bottom left. They need resistance to abrasives, and they need to be resistant to chemical reactions, and screen printing lends itself to that. 
    • Comparing what it is good for and then considering if you were either getting into the space or you were already working in this space, what do we need to know? 
    • [00:08:15] Pat McGrew: It is longevity. Screen printing in areas that need longevity. While you might not think of the concert t-shirt as requiring longevity - I will admit to having concert t-shirts from the eighties in a drawer, and they still look like they did when I bought them, even after being washed a million times. There is something to be said for creating something that is going to have longevity to it.
    • [00:08:34] Ryan McAbee: The print probably held up better than the fabric. 
    • [00:08:36] Pat McGrew: In a lot of cases, yeah. There are times when you are tempted to cut the image out and keep it, and get rid of the t-shirt. Put it on another t-shirt.
    • One of the other things we see is that there are technologies in screen printing for reproducing repeatable patterns.
    • Rotary screen printing is very popular because it has that repeatability and it is married to the durability, right? It is that combination that makes it a really great and often cost-effective solution, especially when you are doing high quantities. You think about something as silly as a concert t-shirt; they do not make five, right? They are making tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, depending on who the artist is and the venues. You do not do that on a digital device typically. It is going to require something more robust. 
    • [00:09:16] Ryan McAbee: Anytime you are in that analog to digital conversion, there is always that point in quantities where it makes sense to switch over from one technology to the other. The same thing is true in commercial printing. The same thing exists here in screen printing; if you have the digital alternative, you can go for the smaller quantities. Absolutely that determines your cost factor, and that really drives what technology you are going to use.
    • [00:09:35] Pat McGrew: Considerations are important, too, because screen printing is not a push-button setup. It is a manual setup. That is going to be true whether you are on a single, manual screen printing platform, or you are on one of the bigger devices. There is time to set up the screens. There is time to make sure they are registered. You have to do some testing.
    • Of course, we know time equals money. It is slower than their digital equivalent. But again, there are trade-offs that you look at. And there is that waste. So it is just one of those things to think about. 
    • [00:10:02] Ryan McAbee: Those are all good points. I guess the way to word it is that analog printing, in general, has more weight. It has more processes. It has more inputs and consumables that are going to be used, which affects time and cost considerations.
    • Pat, thank you for joining us and walking us through all about screen printing. We hope that you will join us here on a future episode.

10- Industry Speak: Acronyms & Jargon

PSP, GSM, DFE!? The printing industry loves acronyms. In this introduction to our industry jargon, we cover the major types of printers, a few terms related to paper and substrates, some equipment terms, and essential software acronyms.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hi there. It is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and I have my colleague Pat McGrew from McGrewGroup here. We are going to try and decipher some of the mysteries and jargon and acronyms because every industry loves that, including the printing industry. Pat, before we get into it, is there any particular favorite one that you love that nobody knows?
    • [00:00:19] Pat McGrew: Years ago, we used to play sort of an acronym Bingo game at some of the industry association events I would go to. The one thing I think we all learned is that a lot of acronyms have multiple definitions depending on where you come from. At the time, the term CD -  compact disc had just come into our usage. But to all of our friends who were in the financial services vertical, that was a certificate of deposit. What you have to understand about any TLA - three letter acronym - is that you do want to make sure you are using it the same way someone else is. If somebody uses an acronym that you have not heard, please ask them about it. 
    • Because, I like ETL - extract, transform, and load. Of course, I also like ELT, which is extract, load, and transform. You might be in an industry where it has a totally different meaning, so it is always worth asking. 
    • [00:01:11] Ryan McAbee: Sometimes you have to put your decoder ring on because even inside the printing industry, the same term or the same function has different terminology. I am trying to think of the one where it is concatenate versus combining. It is the same thing. It is just called something different. 
    • [00:01:25] Pat McGrew: Folios and signatures, right? Folios and signatures are really the same things. The other thing that you will find is that in-plants will have their own set of terminology, different from their analogous counterparts that are not in-plants. Just how they term their workflow steps can be different. What they call finished products can be different. 
    • [00:01:43] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of in-plants, that is a type of printer. It is probably best to start there to say there is a whole list of printers, and we bucket them into groups to say this is the type of work that they actually output.
    • Today, though, we find that very few printers fall completely into one of these buckets. They have scope creep in a way, meaning that they print a lot of different things in many cases, and they are not one true thing anymore. We still use these terminologies because that is their primary focus or that is where they started. 
    • [00:02:12] Pat McGrew: Especially over the last two or three years, where a lot of organizations just to stay alive started doing work that they had never done before. People who would never have called themselves a label printer or a sign and graphics printer. But because they can do them, and they are doing them, and they find there is a revenue stream there, they may continue to do them, but they still may not call themselves a label printer.
    • [00:02:31] Ryan McAbee: That is not how they see themselves. Absolutely true. I will take the first few, and then I will pass it over to you. 
    • Commercial printer - that is usually the catchall. Those are the people, the printers, that will literally print anything that you show up with at their doorstep and say, I want to have printed. If they cannot do it themselves, they will usually find a way to outsource it and get it done for you. They are used to doing that. That means that they print a very diverse mix of products, and they usually have many different types of printing and finishing technologies under their roof. 
    • Transition that to direct mail. It is a narrower focus where they are usually printing pieces to go into the mail stream, like postcards from a marketing collateral point of view. It goes into the national postal systems, like the US Postal Service. In that case, it could be digitally printed, or it could be a mixture of offset and digitally printed because you have to have some sort of digital capability just to do the addressing, if nothing else. Because it goes to me versus you - in your mailbox. They tend to also specialize and know a little bit more about how to work with those national postal systems and how to get the mail inserted into the mail stream so that it makes it to the right place.
    • In-plants are serving a larger organization, so an enterprise or a university setting or maybe a financial institution. It is a print shop inside of that organization. We encourage you to watch our episodes about the insides of these types of printers and also the operations of these types of printers because in-plants have different operational models. They are either just covering their costs or considered a cost center to the company. Maybe they are even taking work in from outside and using it as a revenue generator. Different ways to do it, but an in-plants primary purpose is really to serve the larger organization that it is a part of.
    • Then we have the packaging realm of converters. A label printer is considered a packaging converter, but we tend to call it a label printer instead of a packaging converter.
    • [00:04:09] Pat McGrew: A fun acronym L&P. We very often refer to this group of printers as L&P printers, and that kind of assumes that the L is the label and the P is the packaging.
    • [00:04:20] Ryan McAbee: The packaging is the rest of the stuff. In terms of packaging, there really are four primary types that you will hear about. Labels are one of those, but it is often called L&P. You also have folding carton. Those are like cereal boxes if you want to think of them that way. 
    • You also have corrugated, which are those lovely boxes that we use to ship. More and more, so they are becoming primary packaging, which has nice printed graphics on it. 
    • Finally, you have flexible packaging, which we have seen explode, really. If you go into any retail environment these days, a grocery store, you see these soft, flexible packages that are holding some sort of liquid.
    • [00:04:49] Pat McGrew: Or granola or all sorts of medicine. My vitamins come in a flex pack. 
    • [00:04:54] Ryan McAbee: The reason that we are seeing the explosion is because it helps with shipping costs - you can fit more of them into a box to get to where it is going. There are other benefits as well that we go through in the modules. 
    • Lastly, Pat, walk us through screen printers through transactional. 
    • [00:05:07] Pat McGrew: Screen printers are artisans. They create printed products by actually laying layers of ink down on the material, which could be paper-based, could be film, could be textile, right? Could be all sorts of different things. 
    • [00:05:25] Ryan McAbee: This one has a misnomer in it. If you have had any experience with a screen printer, you think of it as a t-shirt kind of application, but they do a lot more than that, right? 
    • [00:05:32] Pat McGrew: Shower curtains, wallpaper, the large format industrial stuff in industrial and art installations. Screen printing is the act of laying the ink down over and over again. You are working to a template, and you squeegee the ink into place, and then you get the excess off, and you go on to the next color. It is fun to go into one of the large print trade shows and see some of the automated screen printing machines where the process is automated. Literally, someone loads what is going to be printed on one end, and then they pick up the finished piece on the other end. And it might have 4, 5, 6, or 8 colors that are being laid down on it.
    • Screen printing is not limited. A lot of the fine art screen printing is still done by hand. And when it is done by hand, you have unlimited options on how the ink can be laid down, and how the ink can be mixed. How it is going to be used. It is a pretty amazing process. 
    • Sign printers are a group of people who print the billboards you see on the side of the road. Think of vehicle wraps. Think of signs that you see in your sports stadium. Signs that you see at the bus stop. Signs that you see in the front windows of your grocery store. Think about tradeshows where you have those pull-up signs that every vendor seems to have. Signs that you see at the counter as you are checking out of a retail store.
    • Signs come in every size, every shape, every weight, and on almost any material you can imagine. It is all down to the purpose that it is going to serve. Printers tend to specialize. The sign printers tend to specialize. If you specialize in billboards, you are probably not as excited about printing the tiny things because your process is set up for the giant stuff.
    • I have a friend in Australia who is a sign printer. He specializes in gigantic signs, the kind that hang in sports stadiums and under helicopters. His process is built to handle these giant files and giant materials and sew them together and get them positioned. He is not really interested in doing a bunch of hang tags for a local big box store.
    • Transactional printers are the people who handle your personal financial and personal health data printing. These are the people who produce your credit card statements, your claims checks, your Explanations of Benefits from your insurance company, and your retirement statements. 
    • These are highly secure environments. They typically have quite intense IT departments and data security, and cybersecurity environments. They go through audits not only from their customers but sometimes from government regulators. They are typically producing work that will go into the mail stream, as you said, USPS, Canada Post, or whoever your national post is.
    • They live under a very tight set of constraints, but they typically print a very high volume. They are experts in understanding how to get the mail lodged in the system. The funny thing about direct mail printers is that some of them come from the transaction segment, and some of them come from the commercial segment. Direct mail seems to be that meeting point where the art of commercial print and the science, the data science, of transactional print meet - at direct mail. 
    • [00:08:26] Ryan McAbee: That is a great way of looking at it. We also accidentally skipped publication. That is anybody that does bound work for books, magazines, reports... 
    • [00:08:33] Pat McGrew: Directories…
    • [00:08:33] Ryan McAbee: Directories, catalogs, magalogue. 
    • [00:08:35] Pat McGrew: These used to be the people who printed the yellow pages. We do not print a lot of those anymore. Publication printers can be for commercial publications or even association magazines, high school newspapers, and college yearbooks; those are all publication printers.
    • [00:08:48] Ryan McAbee: You wrap all of these printers together, and you may hear them referred to collectively as printers, as print shops, or as print service providers with the acronym of PSP. That is basically any kind of business entity that does production printing. 
    • [00:09:00] Pat McGrew: Typically, a print service provider is for profit, right? So typically, a print service provider is differentiated from an in-plant. 
    • [00:09:09] Ryan McAbee: That is true. And in-plants, probably the single exception on the list there, where it is not a for-profit enterprise. It could be, so it is not always the hard and fast rule.
    • Inside any of these print shops, there probably is a role that is abbreviated as CSR, which is the customer support representative. They are usually the liaison between the customer and the sales staff that is part of the print shop - they basically interface with what is being requested in terms of print from the customer. They do the back and forth with the sales team and with the customer to make sure everything is OK and handle inquiries. “Hey, where is my job?” That sort of thing. Then they also interface with the production staff inside the print shop to know where things are.
    • [00:09:45] Pat McGrew: The jack of all trades, right? Very often, your customer service representative, whatever you call that person in your organization, is the person who is most knowledgeable about what substrates are in stock, what you can print, and what your finishing looks like because of their interaction with all departments. They are usually the most up-to-date on what schedules are available. They are the problem solvers for the organization. 
    • [00:10:05] Ryan McAbee: Let's transition to materials, or you might hear us call them substrates in all these different modules. It is the thing that you are actually printing on - the material - and it can be varied. It does not have to be just paper. It can be plastics, fabrics, woods, metals, pretty much any material you can imagine these days, and any kind of thickness and shape because there is even direct-to-shape type printing that we are getting into more and more.
    • [00:10:25] Pat McGrew: Printing on golf balls. I like printing on golf balls. 
    • [00:10:28] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. Traditionally that would have been done with pad printing, but now you can do it digitally. 
    • [00:10:31] Pat McGrew: Stop right there. Pad printing is what? 
    • [00:10:35] Ryan McAbee: Pad printing is where you have this silicone pad that basically takes and picks up the printed image, and it can wrap around the spherical object to place that image. It is fascinating to watch because there is a distortion factor that you have to figure in to match up with the shape that you are actually printing on. Good for making me explain the terminology here. 
    • In terms of papers, Pat, let's talk about first how we measure or kinda describe the weight of the paper. Because it is not all the same across the board. 
    • [00:11:02] Pat McGrew: It is not, and it is a funny problem. Europeans will tend to talk about grams per square meter, GSM, as the weight of the substrates. In the US, we tend to talk about pounds. You get eight pound, 80 pound, 60 pound, or a hundred pound.
    • Then we might talk about 80 GSM, 120 GSM, or 320 GSM. With the rise of digital printing and because so many of the paper manufacturers who originally supported digital printing were based out of Europe, it is not uncommon in a US print shop to hear people talk about GSM - that they are printing on an 80 GSM or 90 GSM stock paper. 
    • [00:11:36] Ryan McAbee: Paper suppliers are labeling it with both. 
    • [00:11:39] Pat McGrew: Any more they are. One of the things that I have found is this really cute little application called Paper Informant, and it is only for Apple, sorry. Paper Informant can be a really good way for you to figure out what a customer is asking you. Some of your customers, depending on how they grew up in the industry, might spec in terms of GSM. Some might spec in terms of pounds.
    • The other thing is that there is text stock. There is something also called bond stock that you will hear people talk about. There is index stock. Think of it like an index card. There is Bristol stock. Think about the things that maybe you did your science presentation on for the science fair. A very heavyweight card stock. There is cover stock that comes in a lot of different flavors. So you have all these different kinds of paper stocks. And they all might be specified in GSM or pounds, but they are not all the same. A 16-pound cover stock - it is a 25-pound index stock, and that is 44 GSM. 
    • [00:12:36] Ryan McAbee: I think that is where the confusion comes from in paper. If you are in the GSM world, it is pretty straightforward. Usually, the lower the number, the lighter weight the stock is, the thinner it is going to be. As the number increases, it is going to be thicker.
    • The US way of doing it is with basis weights. The weight is determined from 500 sheets of what is called the base size, and that is what is listed in the graphic on the left. But the base size is different though for these different types. 
    • [00:12:59] Pat McGrew: That is why you see all those colors there.
    • [00:13:00] Ryan McAbee: You could end up with something that you think is going to be a heavier weight, but it is actually not because it is a different type of paper. It is always good to have a sample book of your paper from your paper vendor. Also, maybe some tools to do for the conversions, like the app.
    • [00:13:12] Pat McGrew: Yeah, the Paper Informant app, or there are dozens of paper reference tools online. It is always a good idea to have one of them in your saved bookmark list on your browser. There are a lot of apps that you can download into your phone for paper references. I always encourage it because paper is a place people trip up. 
    • [00:13:29] Ryan McAbee: There is also the thickness terminology that you often hear, too. Most of the time, you hear points, you do not hear mils as often, but they are very similar. It is just basically talking about how thick the actual paper is.
    • Let's transition now to some other terminology with equipment. Now we have a digital toner cut sheet printer as the graphic here, but I want to go to a higher level initially. 
    • The same concepts really work no matter what kind of technology you use, where you have the paper feeder at the beginning of the process. And that is actually on the right-hand side in this graphic. Then it is going to go through the actual printing engine or printing units if you are talking analog. That is where the ink or the toner, basically the colorant, is going to be applied to the substrate or the material. Then eventually, you are going to end up on the other side with a finished print or maybe even a finished product if it has inline finishing. 
    • Pat, this just happens to be a diagram of one of those cut sheet toner-type devices where you do see some inline finishing, and this has got quite a bit of inline finishing. 
    • [00:14:23] Pat McGrew: It has a lot of some things that we have talked about in other episodes around booklet finishing and stacking and trimming. All kinds of interesting things. 
    • Now mentally take yourself into a roll-fed environment. You are still going to have a paper feeder, but it is going to be a giant roll. There might be bypasses. There might be multiple routes for paper. 
    • There is a thing called a turret unwind and a turret rewinder. It is this giant multi-roll array that allows high-speed roll-fed devices to never stop. As one roll is finishing out, it automatically splices the next roll to it and keeps on going, and then the operator comes in and removes the empty roll, and puts on a new roll of paper. And they just keep on going, and they never stop. 
    • Paper feeding is going to happen no matter what. And there may still be some sort of bypasses. The printing unit itself is going to vary between toner devices and inkjet-type devices in the digital space. 
    • In the analog space, this would be where your plates would live, right? Where your cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and whatever other colors you might be supporting would live  - in that middle space. 
    • At the point where you have a printed piece, the paper exits. As it exits, it might exit onto a pallet as a sheet. It might exit onto one of those fancy turret rewinds where it fills up the roll, and when it does, it goes to the next one. Those are all possible. 
    • It can also exit into any number of inline processes, as you see here with this toner device, where it can be cut. Consider book activity. In this example, the print exits, and there is a cover inserter, which means that there is a separate stack of sheets that are a cover for a book that is then inserted so that they are in the right location. It gets passed to the inline folder, the inline puncher, the stapler, the stacker, the booklet finisher, and the trimmer. It comes out as a complete entity.
    • In the high-speed roll-fed world, you do a lot of the same thing. It is just that the specific pieces of equipment are just a little bit different. If you are printing publications, there are going to be kinds of inline equipment. If you are doing mail and inserting, you might be unloading into a cutter, perfer, folder, or inserter. An inserter might be inserting in additional other sheets that were pre-printed, - all that stuff we dump out of the envelopes when we open our bills. That stuff might be inserted into the envelope and sealed. All of that is specialized equipment we have talked about in other episodes.
    • When we talk about specialized kinds of motion cutters and dye cutters, very often, that work is not done in line. It is typically done nearline and offline, so it would not be attached to the environment. In some cases, very creative people have figured out how to do that all in line, as well.
    • On your first day at any new print company, it is a really good idea to go have a tour and look at what the equipment actually looks like. 
    • [00:17:10] Ryan McAbee: I think the takeaway here is regardless of the type of printer we are looking at, the functions remain largely the same. You are going to have to take in paper or the substrate, whatever material you are printing on. You are going to have to print it in some way. Then it is going to either exit, or it is going to go into some kind of finishing operation, as you ran us through, Pat, in many different examples. 
    • The other thing that is not listed here on the screen is that there are often quality control aspects built into the different types of printers. One that has a fun acronym is called ILS or inline spectrophotometer. That is a measurement device that is going to read the colorimetric value or the color that has been printed and then compare that against a reference that you want to hit or a target that you want to hit. Then some of the equipment can make those adjustments on the fly to keep you in good color, so to speak. 
    • [00:17:55] Pat McGrew: Many of these devices also have cameras at multiple locations in them. Not just for color management, but for registration management and even data verification to make sure that the right data is being printed. It is being printed where it is expected to be located. Sometimes they are step-and-repeat processes, too. The camera is looking at some piece of data so that downstream, another marking engine will add some additional data to it. This is sometimes how mailing barcodes are added. 
    • [00:18:21] Ryan McAbee: All great points. You definitely can have a lot of these kinds of inspection systems, and verification systems, but it is all for quality control. We have a completely separate module on software, but that is where we find out a lot more of the acronyms in our industry.
    • We will not belabor it here because there is the additional one that you can watch where we walk through it in more detail. All of the ones that you see in the top section are really about managing the environment, managing the business, and different aspects of the business.
    • Just as a sampling. To manage your customers and know who they are and what kind of business they have, what orders they had in the past that they have actually paid for, and the ones that maybe you quoted and they did not pay for. All that kind of data and information can be wrapped up into a CRM or customer relationship management system.
    • Another very common one, the only other one I will mention just because it applies to a lot of different printing, types of printers, and print segments, is the management information system or print MIS. That is the brain of the operation. It controls the business workflow aspects - so everything about the customer, the orders, the ticketing that happens in production, and so forth. Then, Pat, at the bottom here, we have different acronyms that are used in the actual production workflow. Things like web-to-print, which is online print e-commerce, where a customer can go order a product on a website.
    • Then we get further downstream. And I know these are two terms that we debate a lot, and you love them. Digital front ends and raster image processor. How are those things different and alike? 
    • [00:19:38] Pat McGrew: We will take the second one first - raster image processor. That is really a program that sits at the front end of the digital press that converts the print file into whatever the marking engine needs.
    • If it is an inkjet printer, it is translating it into what the heads need to know to drop ink correctly, right? If it is going into a toner engine, what does the imaging engine need to know? Maybe it is a full-page raster that it is transferring into the imaging unit. In a CtP (computer-to-plate), it is the same thing, right? The RIP is creating giant bitmaps that are then imaged for printing. 
    • The digital front end incorporates a RIP, but it does a whole lot more. It gives the operator all sorts of capabilities. The digital front end is often where the operator has the opportunity to start a job, end a job, or stop a job if he starts to see something is out of whack. Like the color does not look right, or oops, I loaded the wrong paper. It does happen. 
    • The other thing - digital front ends are usually kind of the brain behind the digital press. It is where data can be captured from inside the machine, from sensors inside the machine, and consolidated for transmittal into production dashboards and business intelligence systems.
    • For me, the DFE is the big thing that controls the interaction of the print file and the marking engine. The RIP is the horsepower behind transforming a PDF file, for example, into exactly what that marking engine needs in order to image correctly.
    • [00:21:07] Ryan McAbee: The thing that I would have mentioned about digital front ends is that you might actually be using tools that are attached to the digital front end to do things like imposition or color conversion and color correction. It just depends on your workflow.
    • [00:21:18] Pat McGrew: You will see that more commonly in very short-run, lower-volume environments where it is a very much hands-on process. Not so much when you get into a higher-volume, massive number of job kinds of automated environments.
    • [00:21:31] Ryan McAbee: Very good. That is the lingua franca or all the acronyms.
    • [00:21:36] Pat McGrew: It is the starter set. 
    • [00:21:38] Ryan McAbee: Hopefully, as you go through the modules, you will get a flavor of it and add to it as we go along. We did not want to overwhelm you too much in the beginning. If you do ever need to reference this, you know where to come and get it.
    •  We hope that you join us here at a future episode at The Print University.

62- Paper 101

In our first look at the critical role that paper has in our industry, we dive into the most important considerations guiding substrate choice. We also discuss the difficulty of categorizing paper and paper weights in the US versus international markets.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode here at The Print University. Today we're going to be talking about Paper 1 0 1 in our continuing introduction to production printing series. So Pat, paper is obviously a foundational item when we're talking about printing in most cases, but it's also one of the most confusing topics because how we classify it and all of these things.
    •  We thought it would be appropriate to have this kind of primer on paper. 
    • [00:00:28] Pat McGrew: Paper means a lot of different things to a lot of different print industry niches. What you're seeing here on our video is actually a paper making machine where the big roll is being rolled back up. 
    • What we know about paper is that it comes in so many different sizes. It comes in so many different formulations. It comes for so many different purposes. Think about it, the paper that makes a nap isn't the same as what you put into your printer on your desktop. It's certainly not the same. 
    • [00:00:59] Ryan McAbee: Let's hope not. 
    • [00:01:00] Pat McGrew: Let's hope not. It's certainly not the same as what you use in medium speed, high speed printing devices, whether they are digital devices or they are analog devices. Paper is this massive infrastructure underneath this industry. It does require understanding some of the jargon and some of the fine points in order to really understand what kind of conversation you should be having with your paper merchants and paper vendors. Also with your designers to help them understand what all the options are and how they should be specifying things if they're looking for a certain look.
    •  Let's talk a little bit about the infrastructure of paper. 
    • [00:01:45] Ryan McAbee: I think what's interesting in the marketplace that we've been seeing over recent years, and we think it's going to continue forward... We think every type of paper that manufactured actually goes into graphic communications paper for printing. But that's not true, right? It's only about a third of the paper that's actually milled or created, ends up being used for our industry. That's because there's been some transition in the actual mills themselves. Some of them had closed down. Some of them are transitioning to more materials to support folding carton or other packaging elements with the corrugated boxes and all of that kind of thing. It's important to know that our supply is probably going to remain finite and constrained going forward, which means it's also a good idea to become familiar with all your different paper options. You may have to lead a customer to use a different type of paper versus the one that you originally had talked to them about or even quoted.
    • [00:02:34] Pat McGrew: You want to think about that in terms of understanding the purpose for the paper, right? So we say pick with a purpose. If you're doing transaction bills and statements, you may have a favorite paper that you've always used, but you may find it's constrained. It is always possible to find other similar papers that will work for you. It's a question of conversations with your paper merchants and vendors. 
    • It may be that you are in the offset space or you are in the sign and display. The same thing. You want to make sure that you're looking at your substrate selections, right? Paper is a substrate, just like vinyl is a substrate. Just like film can be a substrate and aluminum can be a substrate. You want to pick your substrate with your purpose, but you want to always be keeping an eye out for all those backups. What are the other things that you could be using if you can't get your first choice? 
    • For those of you who are design that's something to think about, but also for all the print providers out there. It's always a great idea to have a bag of tricks because the quality is going to be really important and paper does help determine the quality. It's one of those things that sometimes we forget. Yes, you can print on the cheapest paper you can get your hands on. You might not be as pleased with the quality of the output, as if you had actually spent a little bit more money and gotten a higher quality paper for that same job. On the other hand, the purpose of the print can determine your acceptance of quality as well. How many times have you picked up a newspaper and seen color that was out of registration and nobody really seemed to care. We think of printing on newsprint as not being the highest quality.
    • We think of magazine printing as being very high quality. So think about the purpose and the longevity of the pieces as you're looking at your paper selections, because paper's your fifth color.
    • [00:04:28] Ryan McAbee: There's all kind of components with selecting the paper that are important to the overall design and obviously what finished product you're going to get. I think back to when I was in university, I actually chose a textured paper. I forget the printing process that I used, but the outcome was basically that it was cracked ink all over the place because of the texture of the paper. Good learning lesson in that environment, but something you don't definitely don't want to do in your production environment. 
    • You're right when it comes to papers the fifth color. What's interesting today is that even digitally you can take a dark colored substrate and maybe print metallics or white ink or toner to get a whole different design aspect, just because of the color of the paper that you're also selecting.
    • There's many other components to paper. So let's run through kind some of the top things, considerations, when you're choosing a substrate or paper.
    • [00:05:14] Pat McGrew: When you look at our graphic around substrate choices, we want you to think about all the different elements that go into what you're going to be printing on. It has weight. There's size considerations. There is the color of the substrate itself. There's the texture and finish. You heard Ryan's story about cracking ink, but you could also have paper that because of the texture, because of the finish, accepts ink really well. Maybe it blows up and bleeds out and you get a dot gain on it, which is when the ink that you drop actually spreads out because it's on a very absorbent substrate. We have not talked a lot in our episodes about grain direction, but grain direction is a consideration. When you're looking at paper, you want to understand that and what the use is going to be. Is it going to be an indoor use? Is it going to be an outdoor use? Is it going to be going through the mail stream where it might be rained? Or snowed on or hailed on, right? These are all considerations for your paper.
    • We look at two basic categories, Ryan. We look at uncoated paper and we looked at treated and coated paper. Your uncoated paper is your newsprint. It's created. It is put on a roll and it's sent out the door. It doesn't have a lot of chemicals, a lot of additional work being done to it. It is a highly absorbent stock. In fact, when I was growing up, we used to use the newspaper to wash the windows because it was very good for that. 
    • A lot of book papers are uncoated stocks because of the specific look and feel that the designers are looking for. For years bills and statements and regulatory communication is going out on uncoated stock because the goal was always to keep the cost down as low as possible. That started to change over the last decade as more and more color started coming to those documents and color got to be a consideration. Today you'll see a pretty healthy mix of people printing on uncoated stocks and treated or coated stocks if they're using a lot of color in those types of regulatory communications.
    • Envelope paper is very often an uncoated stock. Traditional letterhead stocks are often uncoated stocks. 
    • Then you get to the treated and coated. Ryan, when we talk about treated and coated, what are we really saying has been done to that paper? 
    • [00:07:35] Ryan McAbee: It's basically additional processes to get the finish and the end texture of that product.
    • The thing that separates the two in my mind as guidelines generally, and there's always outliers and everything, is that on the uncoated side, it's probably going to be less expensive. It's probably going to be more absorbent, and it's probably not going to be as bright. That's another consideration when you print and how it interacts with color.
    • On the treated side, the ink is going to sit more on top of the surface before it dries without having to spread a lot like on coated paper. You get a finer dot structure, if you will. That leads to crisper print and you've got that brightness factor where it can be a lot brighter. They use optical whiteners to really make that color pop.
    •  It's just more processes in how they manufacture the paper means that it's going to cost more. And that's what happens.
    • [00:08:18] Pat McGrew: It can. For years I have used glazed and glazed donuts as my example. You think there's a plain cake donut, right? All the flavor has got to be in that mix, so when you bite into it you know what flavor you're going to get. Or you can be surprised by the flavor. If you think about it, it's a very porous surface. Think about glazed donuts where that cake has now been dipped into something. Think about what happens if like a drop of water or a drop of your coffee kind of slides across your glazed donut, it just keeps on going versus on a cake donut, it actually absorbs it in. That's really the uncoated and treated and coated differentiation. One is going to allow a lot more absorbance than the treated recoated stocks are.
    • That becomes really relevant when you are starting to think about how much of your consumable you're going to be using. Toner is always going to sit on top, but all of your inks always have the opportunity to be absorbed into the substrate, into the paper if it's a pulp based paper.
    • That's where you want to start to think about how much absorbance you want to allow, because it can actually impact the cost of print based on how much of that consumable you might be using. 
    • [00:09:31] Ryan McAbee: I like the donut analogy. You could even carry that further out. If it's a sprinkle on top donut, that's like a textured paper.
    • The other tip I think we should leave people with before we continue on here. If you're new to industry and aren't sure what grain direction is or how to check for it, it's when the paper is manufactured and the fibers align in a particular direction.
    •  You typically want to print with the grain because you're going to be able to more easily fold it or convert it at the end into whatever product. If you take any sheet of paper and you fold it in half at one point. If it folds nicely and the edge is very crisp, that's with the grain. If you fold it and it looks jaggedy on the edge, that's going to be against the grain. That's what it's going to look like or could look like at the end when you're trying to put it through a folder or a stitcher or whatever process you're doing on the backside.
    • [00:10:15] Pat McGrew: Which is where it really becomes relevant. Very often when the paper is delivered the information about the grain direction is on the packaging . You should be able to identify for your paper what the grain direction is, so it's loaded into the machine. 
    • Now, roll paper is only going to go one way. For sheets of paper, when you're doing sheet-fed processes, that's where you really do need to pay attention to it. Some stocks it could be just as easy to load one way or as another, and you want to make sure you're loading in the right direct.
    • [00:10:43] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely true. We didn't talk much about indoor outdoor because we're going to get to that when we pr talk about some options around signage where it applies even more. 
    • The other thing I think we should encourage people at this point to do, if you're new to the industry. I guarantee you that your print shop has sample books from at least their primary paper vendor. Start looking at them and you can feel and see the differences in the texture, in the colors, in the weights. That will give you a good sense of how these things distinguish versus just numbers on a sheet and kind of what we're talking about here. Go touch and feel. 
    • Here we're talking about the confusing aspect of paper, at least in the US market. It's more easy to follow in other markets outside of the US because of our measurement system. How do we know what weights are and what sizes, general sizes we should be looking at?
    • [00:11:31] Pat McGrew: One of the things to remember is that in the US we tend to talk about paper in terms of pounds. The rest of the world talks in terms of GSM. One of the things that I learned a long time ago is that I'm never going to ever get that conversion right.
    •  There are out on the net and for your phone, there are dozens of different paper conversion applications that you can put on your phone to do an easy conversion. One of the reasons I recommend that is because, 20 years ago you didn't see people specify GSM in the US and market. Today it is just as common for a paper vendor, especially since there's so many European and Asian papers coming into the US market, being specified in GSM. It helps to understand what that conversion factor is. We'll start there.
    • Let's talk about just the confusion of what things are bond paper, ledger paper, mimeo paper, duplicator paper, rag paper. Why do we need so many names? Ryan, I don't understand. Why is there offset paper, book paper, text paper, encoated paper. It's different from cover paper and tags or stock paper and index paper. Why are they all so different? And why do the sizes, the sheets vary? 
    • [00:12:49] Ryan McAbee: As I'm looking at the list here, I think in order, if I'm not mistaken, the rigidity and thickness of the stock actually increases as you go down the list.
    • So when you get to indexed think of like an index card, it's very stiff and rigid. Some of them are very specific, you mentioned rag paper. That means it has a certain consistency of fabric, cotton typically inside the paper. It's not just wood pulp it's a mixed in with something else. Matter of fact, the US currency is all rag. 
    • [00:13:14] Pat McGrew: By linen content, yeah. 
    • [00:13:16] Ryan McAbee: Exactly. Then you get into standard sizes, which are listed on the right here. Those standard sizes are also factored into what's called basis weight. How much does 500 sheets of those standard sizes weigh? That's how we get complete the circle here in terms of the weights of the paper. 
    •  Pat, just for clarity here, what's the GSM acronym stand for? 
    • [00:13:36] Pat McGrew: It's grams per square meter. 
    • [00:13:38] Ryan McAbee: The other reason we're seeing it in our market is because the equipment manufacturers are often in other countries, right? That's what they're using in the specification sheets for the actual equipment. It can print it to 300 GSM or it can do this amount of gsm. It's good to know how to use both systems. 
    • [00:13:54] Pat McGrew: It really is. One of these apps that you have on your phone can really be a great aid. Your paper vendors have plenty of paper education available to you that can help you understand how they're making their specifications. If you're working with a paper distributor who carries substrates that come in from all over the world, they already have easy ways for you to understand the difference in the weight so that you can match a pound weight to a GSM weight so you can make sure that you're buying like things. 
    • It is really good to get comfortable with both specifications because going forward paper is going to continue to be a constrained commodity. You may need to be making decisions every month about, what you're going to print certain jobs on, especially if you have long-running contracts that call for, a statement, weight or something for light direct mail marketing or for signage for standard things that you do. You're going to want as much variety in your catalog as you can get so that you have much more freedom to make late binding decisions if you can't get a shipment of what you usually use. Understanding what the matching pound and gsm equivalencies are can be really useful. 
    • [00:15:10] Ryan McAbee: Since we're on the topic, when we were at an event earlier this year. Because of what's happened in the market with paper over the last couple years, every printer almost raised their hand and said they had to go find more paper vendors to work with on the sourcing side. If you're doing that's a good practice. You're not alone and that's probably something that you want to maintain those relationships going forward. 
    • [00:15:31] Pat McGrew: Yeah, it's absolutely true. 
    • [00:15:33] Ryan McAbee: Let's talk a little bit about substrates, not particularly paper. Substrate is the global word for whatever you're going to print on because not everything is paper. That is definitely true when we get to the wide format space where we're talking about all these fun applications for signs that go inside, outside, they may go on the floor. There's different reasons you would use different materials, right? 
    • [00:15:53] Pat McGrew: There are. Think about big banners and signs that might be in a pull up stand or things that might be hanging from a ceiling or hanging from grommets just along the wall. You can use a lot of different substrates. You can use pulp-based substrates, you can use plastic based substrates. Things like vinyls and films. In addition, you can use polyester fabrics. You can use things like aluminum, and more rigid materials as well. The trick is to understand what the purpose of the project and match the substrate to the environment that those things need to be located in.
    • So it's not a really great idea to use a cardboard or a tag type stock to put something outside, right? That's probably not going to last real well for you. 
    • You also want to think about external conditions. Is it going to be in high sun or is it going to be in the rain? Is it going to be in the wind? Because that colors your choice of substrates as well. If you're going to be in a high wind area, you may want a fabric banner so that you can put slits in it so that the wind can pass through. You might want more of a mesh fabric, so that the wind can pass through. There are a lot of different considerations for all of those things that we think of as banners and billboards and building wraps.
    • Building wraps are typically going to be on some sort of adhesive stock because it's going to clinging to the surface of the building. It's the same thing with car wraps and truck wraps. Around where I live, bus wraps are very popular. Even our light rail is wrapped. When it goes by, they've found a way to monetize it.
    •  You want to be matching your application to your substrate to make sure it's going to have the longevity that your customer demands. If your customer is saying, "look, I don't really care. I only need it to be up for 24 hours. This is a fast event, and I just need some cheap wayfinding signs." You want to help them get to the right cost model to do that. If it's something that they're expecting longevity for a week, a month ,or a year. That is where you start to have these conversations about other substrate options in that outdoor print category.
    •  Ryan, in indoor print, you could use any of those substrates, right? Anything that you're using outdoors, you can use indoors, but you do expand your range when you're indoors. 
    • [00:18:16] Ryan McAbee: You do expand the range because you don't have to worry about the environmental conditions. You don't have to worry about the UV rays, or the rain or the wind, or whatever we may get into when we have something outside.
    • For all the categories though it comes down to do you need a flexible material or do you want the rigid material? That's one decision point. The other decision point is always a trade off, is the cost, right? Maybe you can use one material versus another. As an example, think of like yard signs. You can use aluminum, but those are going to cost more than if you were to use coroplast, which is a corrugated plastic. There's that kind of consideration on cost. 
    •  Even some indoor signage, you have to think about how it's going to be used. Think about floor graphics. They need a non-slip texture so that if you walk on a floor graphic, you're not going to slip and fall. That's still environmental.
    • [00:19:03] Pat McGrew: And in biohazard areas, right? If you are in a manufacturing plant where there are chemicals or solvents, you want to make sure you're matching your substrates and your print technology to be able to handle whatever might be in a hazmat area. They need more durability. They might need coating. They might need multiple coats in order to be able to survive in that environment. 
    • [00:19:24] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, that's absolutely true. The last consideration to think through on your substrate choice is what kind of printing process are you using? That really boils down to also what ink you're using in your wide-format printer. They've all gotten better in terms of technology and the range of things they can print on. As an example, in previous years without the right kind of ink in a UV printer, it can't stretch enough to do something like a car wrap. Now they've made tremendous improvements in that area, so that might not be exactly true today. That just gives you an idea that you have some limitations on the printing process. 
    •  All these things you have to align to make sure that you're going to get the output in the end that you're looking for. 
    • [00:20:01] Pat McGrew: This is where your vendors can really help you make best choices. 
    • [00:20:06] Ryan McAbee: That's right. We talked a lot about engaging the paper vendor, but that also goes to the equipment vendor side too. They know what materials work best in their equipment as well. Any other kind of parting thoughts here? 
    • [00:20:17] Pat McGrew: Every print job is a series of trade offs. It is trading off the cost of production, the cost of the substrate, the cost of the ink or toner technology that you're going to use against the value it provides to the customer and what the customer's willing to pay for.
    • I've heard vendors say for years that you think treated and coated for quality. That mindset is there because you tend to get more color pop, you tend to get a lot of durability when you're using these treated and coated stocks. Technology continues to change and there are options for using uncoated stocks in across all of the major printing technologies that will still give you exactly what you need in terms of color quality. It might require additional coding post coding in order to get you something that's durable enough to use in the setting that you need to use it in. 
    • This is where you have to understand your cost of goods sold. You have to understand the cost of the substrate material, any post-processing that might be require. Any kind of special curing that might be required, or drying time that might be required. 
    • Time is money, remember. If you can print on an uncoated stock, but it's going to take longer for it to dry and before you can send it out. Even if your coating cost is technically very small and your substrate cost is very small, what's the cost of that time to dry? Think about it across all of those different vectors, right? 
    • I always like to consider treated encoated stocks because I think that they can not only give you that color pop and that durability that I, but I always want with my print no matter what I'm working on. 
    • It can also give you more finishability as well. It might be more likely to go through all the finishing processes, so consider that as you're selecting your substrates. How many finishing processes, how many turns am I asking this paper to make? How many cuts and perfs am I asking it to live with? How many times am I going to fold it and how is that going to work in terms of the final quality of the product? Will the customer be happy with all the things I have to do to it in order to make the final product? Looking at the trade-offs will help you make those decisions there. 
    • [00:22:38] Ryan McAbee: One thing that we haven't related, but it's definitely something to factor into everything with your substrate choices is use your color management system. That will allow you to get the best color. Many of them offer techniques to reduce the amount of coverage that you need to get the same look so that you can save on your consumable cost, whether that's ink or toner. Definitely use those tools when you're factor in your substrate usage too. 
    • We have other episodes in the print university library talking about color.
    • For Paper 101, I think this sums up a good introduction to how we look at paper from the US market, and enough to get you on your way to making the best selections using those substrate choices that we talked about earlier.
    • Please join us again for the next episode here at The Print University

65- Wide Format 101

Display graphics and signage continues to be a great opportunity for most printers. In this episode we cover the basics of how the technology works, important considerations in wide format printing, and a framework for evaluating equipment purchases.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, I'm Pat McGrew with The Print University and with me, of course, is Ryan McAbee, also Print University. Together we've been building a library full of informative information for people coming into the print industry or growing their knowledge base in the print industry. Today, we get to talk about one of my favorite topics.
    • It's wide format printing and Ryan, what I love about wide format is this is the fun stuff. This is the stuff that you see absolutely everywhere. You may not realize what it takes to get from somebody's idea to assign that's hanging up in a store or a billboard. There are so many different things that come out of our friends who do wide format printing, and our video here shows it coming off of a roll. That might be a vinyl. It could be a film. There's a lot of different substrates that come off of rolls, but wide format printing also includes printing flat.
    •  There are devices that make this easy. There are devices that make printing on flat cardboard, corrugated, coroplast, metal, wood, also I have seen printing on a cinder block. What do people need to understand about what makes wide format printing?
    • [00:01:21] Ryan McAbee: We're going to go through a lot of the different kind of considerations and criteria for what you should think about when you're looking to grow into this space or looking to add different equipment to do different kind of applications or final products. You're right, Pat, this is the fun space because usually visually the graphics just pop because that's the whole point of it. There's so much diversity in this space because like you said, you can print on just about any material these days. Matter of fact, I saw AstroTurf printing on a video the other day, so it's very diverse. 
    • Let's talk first about just how that, the technology works. I'd like to mention up front that we do have a couple of other episodes that help in this area too. One is just around inkjet because that's the actual marking technology that's used in wide format. There's a whole episode on that. There's also a whole episode that we'll reference later on again, that's just around finishing for wide format, because there's a lot of different things that you can do and need to do to turn it into a final product.
    •  Up front, Pat, we're talking about how it actually prints. How the ink gets onto the actual substrate, whatever those materials we were talking about before. There's really two primary methods for that. There's piezoelectric which basically uses electricity or a current to change the membrane so that the ink can just drop through. It's very controlled and you can get, usually get different dot sizes out of this kind of technology and it's very precise. The other kind is thermal which uses heat to accomplish the similar thing. Everybody's familiar with this technology because if you have a desktop printer at your home office, you probably have inkjet.
    • From an industrial perspective or a commercial perspective, the print heads are much wider. Some of them are over four inches wide and they can either be mounted on a fixed bar so that the material moves underneath , or it could be like our video when we opened, which is using a multiple pass scanning method.
    •  Each one has advantages and disadvantages in terms of what you're actually producing, right? 
    • [00:03:19] Pat McGrew: They do and their costs associated with each one of the technologies as well. The older method is the scanning head technology. And one of the things that you'll see is that the devices using these scanning heads might be fairly narrow, or they might be almost room wide in some cases. 
    • We used to see a lot of the scanning head technology for producing architectural drawings and engineering drawings, the kinds of big blueprint things that required a lot of width, but didn't require a lot of ink. You were dealing with a lot of fine lines, sometimes only in black or maybe black and one other color. Then over the years, the technology became better. The ability to control multiple kinds of inks or multiple colors of inks got better.
    •  Along the way, this development of a fixed print bar rose in parallel. One of the advantages of a fixed environment is that it gives you a little bit more precision on where a droplet is actually placed. Even with a scanning head, the scanning head is going back and forth and the paper is moving under it as well. Or alternatively, the paper is still or the substrate is still and the scanning head is going back and forth this way, but it's also going across the paper. With a fixed print bar. The bar is always in one place and the paper or the substrate, the vinyl, the cinder block is always moving under it. It gives you a little bit more precision of where the droplet hits. As we started to apply, inkjet with more and more colors, one color, two color, four color, six color, 12 color, 14 color. The precision of where the droplets land got to be more and more important so that you could get really gorgeous, brilliant dynamic print. That's what we see a lot of today. 
    • The technologies have a lot, there's been a lot of improvement in the heads that are used for wide format printing over the years. I think today they're brilliant. You can get really high resolution when you need it, but you can also get lower resolution when that's the right thing to do. The maintenance on these printheads will vary by manufacturer because some of the manufacturers design their printheads to last, but you are responsible for cleaning them and wiping them and flushing them and making sure that they're in the best possible state when you start a new job.
    • Other manufacturers take an approach that they have a defined life, and they're almost disposable. At a certain point when you notice a degradation, you actually just replace the printhead. There are a lot of points when you start looking at wide format technology in terms of what the manufacturers are telling you about what the replacement parts are. What the longevity of printheads are. Even the cost of the ink that you might be using and just the general lifespan of the print technology portion of the white format environment. 
    • [00:06:23] Ryan McAbee: The running cost for wide format and inkjet are something to pay attention to even more so than some other segments of printing. There's always this interesting interplay between the print head, whatever type of ink, because there's multiple types. There's aqueous, latex, solvent and UV and so on. We'll talk a little bit more about those in a second, but there's that with the substrate. You have to have all three components working together to get the output that you want to in the end, once it's printed. 
    • [00:06:49] Pat McGrew: If you put the wrong ink into the wrong head onto the wrong substrate, it's the trifecta of bad.
    •  What can happen is you can print but the ink will not stick. If the ink doesn't stick to the substrate, then you wind up with a really bad 1960s art project. 
    • [00:07:07] Ryan McAbee: In some cases, the ink may not even get out of the printhead. I'm thinking of white ink in particular, it usually has more of a pigment load.
    •  We talked about the printheads, that are these tiny things that go into these larger devices. In terms of size of equipment, you mentioned that it could be really something that's almost tabletop. These devices come in all shapes and sizes from something that's tabletop.
    • A very common one that if you're particularly a commercial printer that you would use is an aqueous based wide format device for your proofing. Those would do your very contract, high quality, high resolution, a color accurate proofs. Those devices you could easily fit in a room in your house or an off, an easily an office space. Then you get up to more of the production level equipment, which is what we see here on the screen. These can go up to five meters and probably even larger, but three and five meters is standard when you get to the larger sizes. 
    •  The configuration, in terms of how the material is loaded, comes in three basic forms. There's roll-fed. In this case, you actually see it using three different roll, but it could be a single roll. Then you have a pure flatbed and the difference with the flatbed equipment is the height of the substrate, you can put a lot more through it. That's where you can put it on a lot more rigid substrates like your woods and your metals and, printing on an entire door. 
    • [00:08:26] Pat McGrew: Cinder blocks. 
    • [00:08:27] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. All these sorts. 
    • [00:08:28] Pat McGrew: A lot of decorative work is done on these devices. As you mentioned, doors and cabinet doors are often now printed. Designers love these devices because they've opened up an entire world of being able to do truly custom work because you can print directly to a cabinet door or a room door or to wall panels.
    • [00:08:52] Ryan McAbee: Then we have both worlds combined and that's what this hybrid equipment is. The only consideration is if you are doing a lot of changeover between your rigid where you're using it in the flatbed mode versus going back to the rolls, then it's going to take time to switch out those materials, and do a little bit of reconfiguration on the equipment. These are the three basic types and formats. Again, they come in all shapes and sizes. 
    • Let's talk a little bit about the inks. Ink formulations and the ink companies have made leaps and bounds over the years. Things that we used to say, "Oh, you can't do this with that kind of ink", the lines and the boundaries have continued to blur.
    • Generally speaking, we do have some pros and cons with each kind of ink set and what they're best used for. You want to walk us through a couple of these, Pat? 
    • [00:09:34] Pat McGrew: One of the things that you'll see is we've got some sort of big, broad categories. For every category you're looking at, there are subcategories. When you're having conversations with vendors, it can get to be a little interesting because everyone's got their own words that they like to use to describe their inks and how they behave. 
    • Generally, if we talk about an aqueous, which is a water based ink, you're going to find a lot of that being used in proofing . You'll see it in photo books. You'll see it in a lot of indoor graphics. Aqueous inks have a reputation for being able to produce high image quality with a low initial investment. Remember that it's not magic. There is color management involved. If we're printing something that we need to be very high quality to match a customer's specific color requirements, you need to make sure you're doing your color profile and you need to make sure that you not only understand the ink but you understand the substrate. 
    •  A water based ink contains water. That means we're going to have to dry it and some substrates can get a little fragile in a drying process. They may be more resistant to drawing. They might absorb so much of that water that it takes them longer to dry. Why do you care? Because that can impact the turnaround time for you to deliver that piece to your customer. Whenever you see us say an aqueous based ink, remember that if you're air drying, which is very common in wide format, you have to allow enough time for that ink to actually dry. If you're doing a larger piece and it's got very heavy coverage, you might need to wait a little while before you try to put grommets or you try to sew two pieces together. Think about that when you're looking at your ink options. 
    • The low investment, high running costs. That's just the trade off you make, but that may be okay for you. You get into it for a price you can deal with and your running cost is something that should be part of your cost of goods sold to your customer.
    •  These are also maybe on the slower side. You typically don't use that technology, the aqueous-based inks, to hang something outside unless you're going to post coat it or laminate it.
    • Aqueous single pass. We see a lot of it for indoor posters, but it's sports applications, sports arenas, any kind of indoor function. If you walk, if you ever go to a trade show and you're walking up and down the aisles, you will see an awful lot of signage that's produced with aqueous single pass.
    • These tend to be faster but they still have the same challenge of the range of media that you have to work with the image durability issues. If you're dealing with posters for a single event, it doesn't need long durability. There is a really nice price equation when you're doing work that isn't intended to last more than a month.
    •  Now dye sub is the weird thing, Ryan, because it's fabrics. For those of you who've been in the printing industry for a while, you may know that you can do dye sub printing on paper and vinyl and everything else, but we see it more and more with short run fabric printing.
    •  Lots of different vendors are playing in this market where they now allow you to load a bolt of fabric in the back end and print either a long bolt of a custom design. It could be for shower curtains. It could be for pillowcases. It could be for wearables for clothing. Some of the systems out there, let you feed the equivalent of a die line that we might use for packaging, but it's actually the pattern to cut out the clothing so that when the bolt comes out, all you have to do is cut out the pieces, sew it together and voila, you have your latest couture creation. 
    • Dye sub is a different kind of ink. It's highly durable and uses special print heads. The other thing is that it has some some cleanup that you need to be aware of. When you're working in an environment using dye sub inks, you'll need to be talking to your vendors about what your responsibilities are in terms of disposing of waste ink and what your cleanup requirements are going to be and how you dispose of the solvents that you'll use during the cleanup operation on the heads. These heads tend to last fairly long, but they do require a lot of cleaning because this ink is... you want to call it stickier? It does cause a little bit more wear on the heads. 
    • When we start getting into things called eco-solvent and solvent based inks these are the ones that are typically used for the billboards driving down the street. Any kind of, road signs business signs, any kind of outdoor use is typically these. You need these types of things to do outside work. Look, you can get into this style of printing in wide format with a low investment. The color range available for these things is just incredible. You can get a lot of specialty colors. You can get custom colors in solvent based inks and eco-solvent inks. Great image quality. These are often not the fastest printers, but this is changing. More and more as we're starting to see the technology get better.
    • As we mentioned with the dye sub inks, we call it environmental concerns and don't take that as negative. It just means that you need to do the work to understand the requirements where you live for disposing of waste ink and any solvents that you're using to clean. It's always good practice to understand what your responsibilities are in your local area and where you live matters. County to county, the requirements can change. It's important to understand it for your calculations for your cost of goods sold and your total cost of print operation, because you need to be building that into the pricing that you do. I have seen printers add a solvent or a waste fee to invoices. The echo solvent inks are a little bit easier. They have a slightly different requirements in terms of getting rid of the waste products, but you really do want to understand it. This will be true actually for the latex and the UV curable inks as well. Always talk to your vendor about what they know about the requirements, but also check with your local your local counties and states and municipalities to find out if there are special things you need to be worried about.
    • Latex got real popular for a while. I think it's now considered part of the pantheon of things that are available. Latex has changed. It's gotten more durable and also more eco friendly.
    • You want to be talking to your vendors about what the latex offering is. What the head life is likely to be with the latex inks that they're offering. You see it used on pretty much every substrate and it tends to give you real crisp images and they the colors just almost vibrate.
    • Tends to be a low investment. You'll see these latex devices come in a lot of different widths. You want to be thinking about the market you're serving and look at where latex might play with that. A lot of application variety.
    •  Latex machines have a reputation for consuming more power. They tend to be interesting hyper designs may include dryers. 
    •  UV curable is exactly what it sounds like. It is ink that goes through a UV curing process in order to effectively harden it. The ink lands on the substrate and it's pretty stable, but until it's cured, it is not ready for use. It's not ready for delivery. It's not ready for finishing. 
    • This is a fast technology. It is a widely used technology. UV curable solutions are really versatile because they can be everything from indoor and outdoor graphic uses to direct to substrate uses on all these crazy things we were talking about. All the decor type items, fabric items as well as metal, plastic, film. You see a lot of it for is polyester type substrates. It is a little bit more expensive to get into. You want to be talking to your vendors about power consumption requirements on UV curable devices because you do have that UV curing. There are different styles of UV curing lamps that are available. Some of them pull more power than others. 
    • [00:17:58] Ryan McAbee: Some are LED with less power. 
    • [00:18:01] Pat McGrew: Some are LED, so you want to have that conversation. There are a lot of conversations to have when it comes to building the perfect wide format environment for you and picking the inks. Remember that some of the devices allow you to change inks. You're not locked into just one style of ink when you buy the device. You will have to clean and purge to change from one style of ink to another but in your business, that may be okay, depending on the kinds of customers you are serving.
    • [00:18:30] Ryan McAbee: That's absolutely true. To do a cheat sheet here . The first two with the aqueous those are really good for the indoor signage. The stuff that doesn't have to hold up to environmental conditions, whether that's sun, wind, rain, whatever. Those typically are in the, sub $10,000 for the scanning, the first ones there, the aqueous water based. The single pass do get a little bit more expensive because they're much more throughput, much higher speed.
    • The last three are really there, they're versatile in what they can print. It tends to be more suitable for those outdoor applications where it does need to stand up to whatever the environmental condition is. With the eco solvent and latex, you can get into those at a pretty low investment point as well. Tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Whereas UV tends to be a little bit more expensive than that, although the price points move.
    • [00:19:17] Pat McGrew: Price points are all coming down to. Years ago you used to say people would put up their hands, go I can't get into UV curable because it's too expensive. Today depending on the market you're trying to serve and who you think is going to buy your output, there are some reasonably priced UV curable solutions in the market from a lot of different vendors. 
    • [00:19:35] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely agree. The only thing that I would point out from the ink technology that we haven't touched on yet. If you are trying to do a food safe applications really think about your ink that you're choosing. As an example, UV cannot be cured a hundred percent. There's nobody that guarantees that. They've developed what they call low migration UV inks, but even those are still not considered safe. You have to really start with what's the final thing you want to produce and then work backwards from that to fit everything.
    • [00:20:02] Pat McGrew: And understand the regulations that might apply. These are a lot of applications that you pass every single day. You might have a poster that's hanging in a bedroom or in your living room. This is just a small percentage of the applications that you might see. Over the pandemic, a lot of us in the print industry became very aware of requirements for things like the discs that would be on the ground to tell you how far apart to stand from the person in front of you. The floor graphics and all of the kinds of reminders, whether you had to wear your mask or not. It was for a lot of wide format printing companies it's what kept them alive through the hard times because everybody needed these things. Anybody who was going to be open in any way needed these things. 
    • Remember that we also see a lot of wide format devices that are printing what I consider to be fine artwork. I have some black and white photography in my house that was printed on a wide format device.
    • The photographer just got so intrigued with how much control and how much precision was available that they started doing photography specifically to print on wide format devices. That allowed them to sell their artwork in a lot of different sizes. They weren't confined to just, an A4 size or an A3 or a smaller B size. They could actually sell their artwork wall size, mural size. I have seen people with like a map of the galaxy on their bedroom wall and all of that stuff comes off of these devices. 
    • [00:21:40] Ryan McAbee: Your example there is a good reminder of how it plays into the substrate part of it. When you're talking about the small sizes and it's a fine art, you probably want to have it on some kind of archival rated substrate so that it will last a long time. It Becomes a really a different application to taking that same image and putting it on a wall. You need to change out your substrate too, because you need it to adhere to the wall to go on to it.
    • [00:22:05] Pat McGrew: I worked with a company that was selling these wall murals for decor. An agency that catered to the designers, interior designers and one of the things that they said was funny. Whenever they do one of these big wall, a big piece of photography or, nature scene and it's going to be one of these big wall placements. They always buy three or four copies of the piece. They buy it so that if there's an installation problem, they don't have to wait for another print to come. They'll typically buy multiple copies, even if they put them in storage and hold them on behalf of their client. If they knick it with a chair, the kid comes up and draws on it, it's easy to replace.
    •  If you're looking for a way to expand your wide format businesses that there are a lot of these design agencies out there, and they don't just buy one offs. If you work with them and they like what you're doing. They'll start to use you for a lot of different projects.
    • [00:23:00] Ryan McAbee: The wide format space evolves. A perfect example is this soft signage example that you see pictured here. That's really grown significantly in recent years, not only in the retail space, but for trade show graphics. There's a very valid reason as to why we've seen that growth. Before that the signs were maybe printed on some kind of vinyl, PVC, plastic. The weight of that to ship and just having to material handle it ,was a lot more difficult and a lot more costly than what you can do with the soft signage. The fabric basically compresses almost to nothing to be able to ship. Perfect example of how the technology evolves and how we figure out new ways to use it, which benefit everybody
    • There's ways to stand out. This technology is very accessible, but it's how you wrap your services around it that really make the difference between you and the competitor in the space.
    • Pat, what are some really interesting ways to add value here? 
    • [00:23:51] Pat McGrew: One of the things we mentioned earlier is that wide format devices come in a lot of different configurations. What we're seeing is even with the narrower ones, that might only be a meter wide, you can get six and eight color configurations. Look at those really seriously, because if you can add more color, if you can give the designers more granularity to the color that is available to them.
    • We do a lot with process color, right? We do some amazing process color that's just the cyan, magenta, yellow and black. If you can add the orange, if you can add the green, if you can add a neon, if you can add a silver, if you can add a gold, the range of inks that are available for these devices today is really quite broad.
    • Some of some beautiful work I've seen uses neon pink as a highlight color. You'll see not just black, but then shades of gray being used to add some additional depth to the work that's being printed. 
    • You might say gee, does a billboard really need that? Or does the poster for my school really need that? It might not, but if you want to expand the range of clients you can serve, then the ability to add these additional color elements is very helpful. Most of your vendors can help you build like a sample book that will help you show the difference between just a process color, a version of a piece of art versus one that adds the silvers or the neons or white ink which is a really popular add. 
    • [00:25:22] Ryan McAbee: I'm glad you mentioned white because in the wide format space, that's the next place you would go after CMYK to add an ink. There's a lot of transparent materials that you can use in wide format space whether it's backlit materials, window cling, and you need to have a base layer of white before you can print the colors on top of that . 
    • [00:25:39] Pat McGrew: if you go to any trade show where there are wide format machines, they're all very proud of their white solutions. That's the one thing you will see all of them demonstrate. They'll show it on clear film, and show you the difference between having the white underlay and not having the white underlay. You will notice that colors really pop when you don't have the ink sinking into the substrate and a layer of white underneath the color really helps you achieve that.
    • [00:26:06] Ryan McAbee: Another way you can add values, obviously, with the array of finishing capabilities. I have to say that in some of the wide format, they almost become custom fabricators in many cases where they have CNC machines. They have all these other kind of tool sets and kits, and create a visual display kind of unit or physical structure that you need.
    • Taking it to a very local example for me. There's a person that does outdoor signage and you go to him. It's printed with an eco solvent machine is terms of the graphics, but he will fabricate however big or small of a sign structure that you need. Because obviously that's a consideration, right? As a buyer, are people going to pass it on the highway at 70 miles an hour and you want it to really be a lot larger or are they going to be driving past it in the neighborhood at maybe 30 miles an hour. That's obviously something that matters when it comes to having conversations with your customers who are buying this and leading them to the correct finishing options .
    • [00:26:59] Pat McGrew: When you have those finishing options, that can make you stand out from your competition. If you have the ability to deliver a sign that is a triangle, has three image sides, and can be mounted, or even a cube that can spin. there are all sorts of different things that you might be able to do. This is one of those places where you can really differentiate yourself with finishing. The wide format device gives you the ability to create the size that your customer will find best for their location, because it might be that they need something really narrow, but really tall. It might be that they need something really wide, but really short.
    • There are all sorts of sign regulations. Wide format people usually get very used to them in the localities that they serve. The value proposition of wide format devices is that it takes a lot of constraint out of the size that you can print, which makes it really great.
    •  That's another place where special substrates can help you to differentiate right? You want to have the conversations with the vendors and really get the full specifications on the kinds of substrates that are approved for their devices, but. Lighter vinyls, heavier vinyls thin plastics clear films, opaque films. Polyester printing on polyester is different than putting on cotton. All the different ranges of even papers, art papers versus recyclable papers. There are so many variations available that will support you in a wide format environment. Know what your press is really designed to do. What the heads and the inks that you have available to you are designed to do because the last thing you want to do is promise somebody that you can print on their extremely heavy muslin because they need it for a theater backdrop and it turns out that you don't have the right configuration to print on muslin. 
    • [00:28:48] Ryan McAbee: Finally here is how for some of these applications provide the installation services. You can do that with your own employees, or you can contract it out in many cases as well. If you think about it in the extreme case, a billboard, you need someone to install it. The customer who's buying it is not going to do that. The same thing can be true with almost any indoor, outdoor graphics. Graphics that go into an airport or into some business. Those usually have to be installed by a professional because it does take a skillset to make sure it's done properly. 
    • [00:29:17] Pat McGrew: It may require permitting. If you have not been doing a lot of outdoor work, or even indoor work at trade shows or within retail environments, signage is usually requires permits. The installation typically requires a permit and it may require a site plan to be delivered to the location for them to approve before the sign is permitted to be installed. That's true whether it's going over the door at a retail establishment, or it's a billboard, or it's going into a trade event. It's one of those things that if it's not in your wheelhouse to be an expert in all the permitting requirements, finding a good installation partner can be a really valuable thing to do. It might be that eventually you grow into doing some installation yourself and you partner for some of it. 
    • If we're talking about, some grommets and hanging it on a hook. You probably don't need to worry too much about that. That's something that you can probably do in house. Anything that's got any complexity to it, you'd really want to be looking for some good partners. 
    • [00:30:14] Ryan McAbee: How do you go about finding the right equipment for what you're trying to do? This is a logical order to think about it. It really starts with the end. What is the product and how is it going to be used by who's buying it? That's really the starting point because then you'll go backwards in the process to the finishing that's required, to the materials that would be used, to then the ink that's going to match up for that material, then the device that uses that ink to put it on that material is the logical path. 
    • The other considerations beyond that are really number five and six. Now we're talking about the production aspect. Because you can do some of these applications on devices that run at 30 square meters, or you can do it on ones that run over 700 square meters an hour. Obviously that's a huge difference in cost of the equipment, running costs are going to be different, and then how much you can actually produce between those devices is going to be extremely different too.
    • [00:31:09] Pat McGrew: It is and the price points on the devices are all over the map. You can go out and spend under $10,000 on a device and start working with it just to understand the capabilities. Then maybe grow into more expensive devices that have more capabilities and more throughput capacity over time. It might be that because of the markets that you're serving, you believe the thing to do is to jump into one of the larger machines. In all cases, think about what you are intending to sell. What your understanding of the workflow that's going to lead that from the file delivery into the front end. 
    • Wide format devices, Ryan, are sold a little bit differently than document processing devices. Very often the digital front end and the RIP are sold separately from the device. Now the manufacturer might deliver a rip to you, but it may not be the rip that's best for the kind of work you are doing for the clients you're serving. Doing some research into which RIPs are going to work best for you, and we'll work with your device. It drives the workflow, right? You may find that the $2,995 inexpensive RIP is great for a bunch of work that you do, but you may actually need a license on a much more expensive RIP to do highly challenging work or more image quality sensitive work. you would want to build that into your running cost equation as you're developing your pricing models.
    • [00:32:36] Ryan McAbee: I'm glad you brought up the kind of RIP aspect because that ties into the color management as well. This is where it really can make a lot of sense to get software that can do that very well because the savings that it could have on your ink just from using UCR/GCR could be significant.
    • [00:32:54] Pat McGrew: Okay, and let's define those terms because not everybody may know the GCR/UCR adventure. 
    • [00:33:02] Ryan McAbee: Gray component replacement is the GCR acronym. And under color removal. On gray component replacement it's basically substituting black where you can to not have the more expensive colors used. Then it's also coming down to ink limits as well, so you may not have to print 100% ink levels. You can back that ink down. So that are the color of color level. It's all different techniques in the color management world to basically get the same quality of output, but cost you less in the end.
    • [00:33:30] Pat McGrew: As a printer, that is something you always want to be paying attention to. The less ink you can use, the better your profit margin might be. 
    • [00:33:38] Ryan McAbee: That's not unique to the wide format space, but it applies even more so here because one of the highest components to your running cost is going to be the ink.
    •  Then we have these productivity considerations, Pat, and we talked about many of these already. You've got the differentiation in speed. I highlighted that between the 30 meters per square meters per hour versus, over 600. You have the physical size that the devices can print. Roll-fed printers standard sizing comes in about 1. 8. You find that size more on the fabric end of things, whereas three and five meter widths are more for the signage and outdoor signage applications. The flatbed printers typically don't run as wide up to the five meter because they're just smaller in terms of the width that they can do because the physics of having that head back and forth on them. 
    • [00:34:23] Pat McGrew: But there are devices out there that are huge. 
    • [00:34:26] Ryan McAbee: Your mileage may vary on that statement. Then the interesting thing that you mentioned on the RIP, raster image processor here instead of digital front end, that's the terminology in the wide format space is usually referred to as a RIP. That's what translates the digital file into the instructions to get it printed. What's unique about the white form of space, like Pat mentioned, was that you basically bring your own, you do not have to use the one that's either provided with the equipment or that they may offer from that same manufacturer of the equipment.
    • Then you have the speed consideration which also gets into the process of how tightly controlled your quality controls have to be from multi passes single pass, because one's moving the head, the other one's fixed. I think we explained that enough in the past.
    •  What we haven't really talked about is material automation. When you get up to those three and five meter size devices, where it have a huge impact. You're not going to have this automation on just a roll-fed 36 inch aqueous printer. They usually refer to it in the wide format space is either three quarter or full automation. That just means, are we automating just the input of the material? Are we automating both sides, the input and the output? That's all about the material movement and are we having people do that or is it being automated by equipment, robotics, et cetera. 
    • I know you've seen not just in the wide format space, but because the costs are coming down a lot of robotic arms. Then some of these AGV kind of applications, not only for the material of the device, but also for warehousing purposes maybe.
    • [00:35:49] Pat McGrew: There lots of it. A trade show I was at about a month or so ago it was a fairly smaller format event, so I wasn't really expecting to see robotics on the floor and yet there they were. The size of these devices and the horsepower needed to drive them in terms of the server rack and the the wifi capability that they need is just so much more accessible now than it's ever been before.
    •  One of the the applications that they were showing was basically a robotic arm used to take the flat coroplast off of a stack and put it onto the printer, load it, and then another device was on the back end that as soon as it was printed, it took it and it put it on to another stack.
    • They had it set up so that it was actually putting it on different stacks, depending on the information it was being given to, to drive it. There was also an AGV that was being used, automated guided vehicle, right? If you've ever seen a picture of an Amazon warehouse, you've seen a lot of them. It almost looks like a Roomba, one of those robotic vacuum. It's very low to the floor, and it's that way because it actually gets under a pallet, and then can lift the pallet up and drive it wherever it needs to go and then put it back down and then back out from under it and go on to whatever its next task is.
    • There was a lot of that and in printing companies that I visited, they use all of that technology for loading and unloading all of their digital devices. It eliminates a lot of people getting hurt because they're not lifting things in the right way or they're lifting things that are too heavy. We're seeing as the prices of these devices come down. We're seeing them come into a lot smaller shops than we'd ever seen them before because they do help you solve a people mitigation problem. The robots aren't going to get hurt.
    • The other thing that we see is for warehouse movement. In the one warehouse that I was in, they have automated guided vehicles that can be sent to the warehouse to retrieve a roll of substrate based on location. It knows exactly where to go. It grabs it with a clamp. Brings it to the device and sets it up so the operator can load it and stabilize it and then it goes off to do its next task. It can also retrieve the role on the other end. If it's doing roll to cut which you see a lot in wide format where they're doing a lot of poster work. They'll do roll cut and it'll land on a palette. At the point where the palette hits a certain weight, the will go pick it up and take it to the finishing station.
    •  Again, this is stuff that when people do it. Mistakes can happen and accidents can happen. The robots typically have a very high percentage rate of getting it right because they're programmed to do what you told them. 
    • [00:38:40] Ryan McAbee: The reality is once you get up into three and five meter widths of anything, either the weight of it, the roll becomes where it has to be equipment assisted anyway. You might as well make it automated or the dimensions are just too awkward for a single person and maybe even multiple people to handle it. It makes sense to use the equipment to do it for that reason too. 
    • [00:39:01] Pat McGrew: You'll hear a couple of terms robot and co bot is when people are working with a robotic arm and it's actually teamwork that makes the dream work.
    • [00:39:09] Ryan McAbee: We'll point you to the episode 54, which is finishing for wide format, but I would just point out here that probably these are the two most common types of finishing devices that you would find. One is a flatbed cutter. Honestly, it's really a multi tool device these days. It not only can cut, but it can usually score, it can perforate. You'll see the head there, it's a tool head and you can swap out, or it may have multiples on there that it just rotates and uses. 
    • [00:39:34] Pat McGrew: It may even be able to do die cuts and specialty cuts. We see a lot of that now these days. Machines have gotten very smart and it's down to the programming. If this is a device you bring into your shop, you really want to investigate how you think you might use it. 
    • [00:39:48] Ryan McAbee: The workflow matters when it gets in the finishing too, because you can add marks to the non-finished areas of the piece to drive, not only this is what job it is, but also automate the cutting and other kind of things that you need to do from the finishing perspective.
    • In terms of the printing equipment itself, here are some major vendors. This is not exhaustive by any means. The wide format space has a lot of different suppliers and vendors. These are some of the ones that are more well known that are operating on a global perspective, I guess is the better way to put it. There's a lot of regional players as well in different regions. 
    • [00:40:21] Pat McGrew: There are. The other thing is for every one of these sometimes they make it easy to find their information on their web pages and sometimes they don't. If you have trouble and you have a relationship with a sales rep, have the sales rep help you navigate the information that you might be looking for.
    • Absolutely. at shows ask who the representative in your region or in your area is so if you want to reach out to them you can 
    • [00:40:47] Ryan McAbee: Almost any major print trade show that you can go to these days will have you guys will be there Variant of wide format equipment and vendor there. That's a good place to also Just see what technology is out there. What advancements are being made what they're showing that's new.
    • [00:41:01] Pat McGrew: They're all bringing new equipment to market. There's a lot of new stuff coming to market. 
    • [00:41:07] Ryan McAbee: We also talked about that you can have bring your own RIP, so to speak. And these are some of the main vendors or software suppliers for the RIP space as well. Again, you can see those at any major trade show event that's focused on any kind of wide format or signage applications. 
    • [00:41:24] Pat McGrew: You'll see them like partnering with you'll see the hardware vendors list all the vendors they work with. You'll see the vendors list all the hardware vendors. It's a pretty open industry because each one of these tends to do some things very well. Some of them are designed to be very price sensitive, so they're lower cost but maybe not as fully functional. Others are designed to do everything.
    • [00:41:48] Ryan McAbee: That's a good place to wrap it up. Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Print University. And we hope to see you back on another episode. 

68- The World of Inks and Their Uses

Understand how ink is a critical part of a printing system with a review of five primary ink types used in production printing.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, I'm Pat McGrew with McGrew Group, and I am with my best friend, Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting. Today, as The Print University, we are going to be talking about ink. Ink is one of my favorite topics, Ryan, because it is so essential to the business that we're talking about. 
    • You might be using ink. If you are a flexo printer, a label printer, a wide format printer, a production printer, a DM printer. Ink may be part of a hybrid system. Inkjet systems may be part of your hybrid systems, but you may be using ink on your flexo device, on your litho device, on your gravure device. Oh my gosh, ink is everywhere. 
    • Because ink is so essential to the conversations we have to have in the print industry. What we want to talk about today is ink so that you have the right terminology and the right understanding of what it's going to take for you to have great conversations with your team members and with the vendors who support you. Ryan, what do we need to know about the ecosystem of ink. 
    • [00:01:02] Ryan McAbee: You're absolutely right. Ink is critical to any printing methodology that you have out there. The only other kind of segment is the toner based systems, which we're not going to cover in this particular episode. We're going to talk about ink and what it looks like, how it fits into everything, and then also cover five of the primary ink types and what you need to be aware of with those.
    •  Like you said, Pat, first and foremost, ink is part of a system. There's not much good it will do without being able to put that ink onto some kind of substrate, whether that be paper, some kind of plastic, wood, whatever the material is that you're trying to print on. That has to work hand in hand with the printing system whether it's flexography that you mentioned, whether it's the lithography offset type printing. All of these different types of printing systems require different ink formulations. The ink has to behave and actually function differently based on that printing technology.
    • We've all seen those examples in the market where you get something printed and it's delivered to you. If it's the same thing that you can compare one to the one to the next as you're looking at it. You'll notice that what it's actually printed on, even if it's the same image with the same ink can look differently just because of the substrate change, whether it's a glossy paper, if it's a matte paper, if it's not paper at all.
    • How you're actually needing to dry or cure that ink so it doesn't get on your hands or doesn't offset onto other things as it goes through the mill or whatever. All these kinds of things matter. You might want to speak to the finishing component. At the end of the day, we use the right ink, we use the right printing method, but if we get it to the finishing and it still doesn't quite work because that ink cracks or whatever else.
    • [00:02:30] Pat McGrew: Or it scrapes. Yeah, one of the funny things that we've seen over the years, especially as inkjet has grown we getting more density on the ink of inkjet printed things. One of the things we know is that if you don't have control of your ink and you have too much ink on the substrate. Or if you have the wrong kind of ink on the substrate, when it gets to finishing, that's when the chickens really come home to roost, right? 
    • What can happen is as you're folding a piece, you can have ink on the underside cracking and ink on the outer side cracking. And we've all gotten pieces that have that characteristic. You can tell that somebody didn't do their due diligence. Between what the substrate was, the ink, and the finishing method they intended to use. 
    • You can see really interesting happen, things happen when like perforations go through ink that is not properly cured. If it's a blade based perf, what might happen is it'll pick up the ink and then leave telltale signs later in that finishing process.
    • You get ink transfer as you are folding, especially if you're inserting it into an envelope. If that ink is not fully dried or not fully cured, you're going to be smearing ink all the way. Again, we've probably all seen it in our own mailboxes where you see the smear, especially when you're touching the substrate multiple times. 
    • Maybe you're printing it offset litho and then running it through a toner or an inkjet device to add variable content. You might even be a third time touching it because you're adding address information with an independent inkjet head or an independent toner device, right? You might be touching the substrate multiple times. 
    • As it's going through finishing, if all those pieces aren't cured and stable, at the finishing point is where you're really going to see terrible things happen. You can see the ink flake off. You'll see in wide format shops, where the drying isn't quite controlled, or the curing isn't quite controlled. You have this gorgeous piece of wide format, it might be a museum replicas, and then somewhere there's this little fleck where something's come off. It might even only be one of the colors that's not curing correctly, and it can just totally change the way everything looks.
    • Finishing is a huge issue. 
    • [00:04:45] Ryan McAbee: I'm glad you brought up the wide format signage aspect, because that goes to the use case function. Sometimes you need ink to perform based on the setting or application of how that print is going to be used. As an example, if you're thinking about having a sign that's going to be exposed to the elements outside, both the light elements from the sun and weather elements, you may want a more robust ink that has what's considered like light fastness so it doesn't fade so quickly over time and you get a little bit more shelf life out of it. 
    • There are obviously these key considerations of ink as participating in entire printing system. In terms of ink itself, Pat, there's four kind of primary pillars. Some of these have different names depending on who you speak with, but generally there's four primary parts to ink. 
    • [00:05:29] Pat McGrew: Yeah, and pigment is the fun part of it, right? Pigment is what determines the color. The colorant that gets used is that milled there are particles basically that gets suspended in your binders and your solvents in order to create the inks that we use.
    • There are so many ways, chemically, that a pigment can be structured to create the cyans, magentas, yellows, blacks. There are a number of different red pigments that are used that have different chemical bases. There are a number of different blacks that get used that have different chemical bases, same with the cyan and the magenta. Then with specialty colors that are specialty, especially formulated, where they've combined a number of things in order to get that brand color into the ink. There's a lot of chemistry. 
    • For all of you people who had chemistry 101 and wondered if you would ever use it in your life, welcome to the print industry where chemistry actually matters, especially in the formulation of the pigments that are going to provide the color for the inks that we use. In a lot of ways, the kind of pigments that we use in combination with the binders and the solvents determine what colors can be mixed together to create a new color and how they will behave with each other, whether they will mix or whether they'll overlap. The pigment is your foundation that gives you the color. 
    • [00:06:55] Ryan McAbee: That's why you hear sometimes, if we have a high coverage printed product, you'll hear people and manufacturers and printers talk about kind of the pigment load. How much is actually transferring, because that's what's going to give you that vibrancy of color. The higher the pigment yield.
    • [00:07:10] Pat McGrew: But you can't go too high. 
    • [00:07:11] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. That's always the trade off, right? As a printer, you need to actually mark on the substrate, but that's also one of the most expensive components to the printing process typically. You want to control that and that's where color management comes in. We have modules that we have gone through in The Print University around color management, but you really are trying to get as much as you need, but no more after that . 
    • [00:07:31] Pat McGrew: Exactly. If the include is too high, especially if the pigment load is too high, that's part of what contributes to flaking off and the problems with folding, the problems with transference. It is an essential part of your knowledge base to understand how all of these elements of the ink are going to interact with your substrates.
    • [00:07:51] Ryan McAbee: Now, pigment is used in every type of ink per se, but we do have kind of two main categories here: dye based ink versus pigment based ink. How did those really differ? How should we think about those? 
    • [00:08:03] Pat McGrew: I grew up in the very early days of high speed inkjet. We were a bit rebellious as we were bringing high speed inkjet to market because we were using dye based inks. That were the highest percentage of water you could actually drink this ink and it would be okay. That'll give you an idea of what the ratio of pigment to water was. It was about like 99. 9 percent water and 0. 1 percent pigment. Dye is it's exactly the same thing. Honestly, it's like food coloring. Basically it's pigment in a binder designed to be aqueous based and designed to be dissolved in water. The net result of that is that systems that use dye based inks don't tend to produce output that is as vibrant as pigment based aqueous inks, right? 
    • The dye is just a lighter form of how it uses the pigment. The pigment is more dissolved in it, so you just don't get that vibrance and it almost doesn't matter what substrate you put it on. 
    • It is great when you're doing things like transaction printing. If you're doing black only book printing, dye based inks can be a good solution, and many of the inkjet vendors do that. It's more of a production inkjet thing than it you wouldn't see dye based inks today in wide format devices, right? Because they need that color vibrance. You typically get pigment based ink or UV curable based ink that has a much higher degree of vibrance in the color. 
    • [00:09:36] Ryan McAbee: I like that analogy thinking about it like food coloring. Let's say you just dropped it onto a sheet of paper, what you'll notice is that it's still wet, so you've got to figure out how to dry that moisture out. So any dye based system is usually going to have some kind of drying system to pull that moisture out.
    •  Then what you'll also notice is that it eventually seeps into the paper when it is dry and becomes part of that substrate. Because of that you've got the variation with your substrate. Depending on how your paper is colored or how your substrate is colored to begin with, that's going to affect how the pigment or the color of the ink actually looks as well. There's more substrate based variation in how the color appears with dye based than there can be with pigment. 
    • [00:10:17] Pat McGrew: The other game that we play is that we can put a primer down on a substrate. If you have a substrate you love and you know the ink is going to spread too much. It's going to get a really massive dot gain, which is how we talk about the the spread of the ink on the paper. One of the things you can do is put a primer down. 
    • If you think about when you're painting your walls in your house, and you're trying to paint light green over dark orange, you'll put a primer coat over it to create a new baseline, and then you'll do your new coat. 
    • Primers work the same way when we're working with ink, and it can be in litho. It can be in pretty much any of the printing technologies. We do have the option to use primers to create a new base for where the ink is going to land. We can prevent it unreasonable dot gain, unreasonable spreading. It can prevent it from seeping into the paper in or whatever the other substrate might be. It also is sometimes used for adhesiveness. If you're printing on plastics, you're printing on films, you're printing on vinyls, where you might not have as good a receptor capability for the ink, you might put a primer down so that it will stick to the primer. That's another way that you can actually get a little bit more vibrance out of dye based inks when you put a primer down because they don't sink into the paper, but that adds cost. You've just got to figure that into your cost.
    • So do I go with dye based solutions or do I go with pigment based solutions? 
    • [00:11:42] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, very good points. The main difference with the pigment based inks, like we mentioned, is that they're usually more vibrant in terms of the color because that pigment stays on top of the substrate.
    • It doesn't soak in or seep into whatever you're printing on and typically more durable, although they can have some flaking issues depending on the adhesion to the substrate. 
    • [00:11:59] Pat McGrew: To the substrate, and this is where, remember we said it was a system? It's your ink, it's your substrate, it's your drying or curing that can have a big impact on it.
    • And it's what's going to happen to that paper after it actually gets printed. What kind of gymnastics are we going to ask the paper to go through? And will the ink be able to be durable enough to last through that? 
    • [00:12:20] Ryan McAbee: The entire system has to be functioning for you to get the final product that you and your customer wants to have.
    •  Let's talk about some of the major ink categories or types. So I'll start this one off with pastings. If you've ever walked into a print shop that does commercial or offset printing, they're usually canisters. If they don't have the modern presses with the automatic ink feeds, what you'll notice is that they'll take a spatula. They'll get some of the ink out of the can and then they'll spread it onto one of the ink form rollers. In an offset press, there's several sets of rollers inside of each printing unit that thin and work that paste ink into a very fine film. You can control as a press operator, the density of that film in your ink system that then gets transferred and offset onto the printed sheet. This type of pasting is very viscous. It, you have to use a little bit of muscle to get it out of the canister typically. There's an ink water balance that happens in offset printing. You have the ink. You have the water that gets applied to the plate where you don't want the ink to be adhered to. Then it all has to get dried out at the end in some kind of dryer configuration. 
    • That ink gets absorbed into that substrate. It does have a great print characteristics as long as you can control that ink water balance and because of that, it also has a very wide substrate range.
    • If you think what can be printed on an offset press, we can go from anything that's a folding carton application with pretty thick substrates that are gloss coated to the most thin uncoated kind of paper you can imagine.
    • [00:13:45] Pat McGrew: What we call Bible paper. 
    • [00:13:47] Ryan McAbee: Yes, bible paper or tissue paper or wrapping paper, whatever. 
    • [00:13:51] Pat McGrew: You think about all the things that you see in a store that are printed, right? The preponderance of it is offset print and would be using this type of ink. 
    • [00:14:02] Ryan McAbee: With these paste inks, the ink company can actually formulate very specific colorants, right? Very specific types of color. If you're trying to match like a specific Pantone color, if you're trying to match a very specific brand color, they can formulate that in a can. You can actually have it as a spot color that's in an additional unit on the printing press. That's another flexibility here that you have with paste inks as part of a system that's using offset printing as its main delivery mechanism.
    • So going on from paste, we have one of your favorite categories, which is going to be aqueous water based inks, because that's used in a wide range of things these days. 
    • [00:14:37] Pat McGrew: It really is. One thing is that you will hear a lot of talk about sustainability in the printing industry. Typically, aqueous inks are looked on favorably because they contribute to the ability to recycle the inks. Most of the aqueous inks that are in the market today have been certified as recyclable. 
    • Now, the substrate might not be, right? But the ink itself does not contribute to a situation where you can't recycle it, right? In most cases the aqueous based inks are very friendly to the environment. 
    • They're used in all the different printing methods. They're used in litho. They're used in inkjet. They're used in all the forms of inkjet, right? So they're used in production inkjet, wide format inkjet, grand format inkjet.
    •  They have a great color range. I always think of it as CYMK and process color but, in fact, there are many producers of ink consumables for the digital market that now produce spot colors the same way they produce them using the paste inks for the offset market or the latex inks for flexography.
    •  The thing about a water based ink is that. It's going to hit the surface of the substrate, and it's going to generally get a little bit absorbed. It means it's not the most appropriate type of ink for film, for vinyl, for the alternatives to pulp based or stone based stocks. I say pulp based and stone based because we are seeing a larger number of stone based stocks coming into the marketplace as well.
    • At one of our family restaurants we use one of the stone based stocks for our restaurant menus. We print them on an inkjet device and it works just absolutely brilliantly. That is definitely an aqueous based ink that we're using. 
    • It does sit a little bit below the surface. That means that because it's not on top of the surface, you have a conversation about the level of brilliance. But again, we often see with aqueous based inks, the use of a primer when that vibrance is more important than the additional cost of the primer.
    • Because it's aqueous, as you just mentioned. You gotta get the water out of there somehow. The danger in a print shop is that there is a temptation to turn dryers up. More heat should be good, right? It should be excellent. The problem is that with the substrate, you're inking it, you're drying it. If you over dry the stock, you can actually make it difficult to finish. You can wind up with snaps and tears and all sorts of other problems. Once it's actually cut and finished, you can see the edges will start to curl. You'll get waves in some of them if they're overdried. There is this concept of re moisturizing after drying and that is sometimes done in order to try and ameliorate what happens to that stock after it's cut.
    •  These are things you actually have to work with your vendor on. They all have solutions that will help you print vibrantly, ensure that the substrate remains appropriately moist in order to go through finishing and go into its final product form. You have to resist the temptation to believe that more heat is good. There are known norms that will get you the best results.
    • [00:17:47] Ryan McAbee: Exactly, and the manufacturers work with you on both the equipment side and the ink side to make sure they have the best recommendations.
    • [00:17:53] Pat McGrew: They want you to be successful. If you are having a problem, say you take on a new ink or you switching suppliers, say, if you start to see that you have some sort of issue with curling or waving, or you're starting to experience difficulties finishing talk to your vendors because they will have a path for you. 
    • [00:18:13] Ryan McAbee: The other thing to point out here, just for a visual for everybody, in terms of the diversity of equipment that this ink can be put in. If you're in a print shop, or if you've gone to one of your local copy places, you'll see a probably 24, 36 inch wide kind of proofing device that's maybe an Epson, Canon, or Hewlett Packard, and that actually uses aqueous ink.
    • And you'll see it print, pretty slowly because it's very high quality. On the flip side of that, you can have very large equipment that's role fed printing. That's very high speed that uses a similar aqueous ink. It's a different formulation, but it's still that type of ink.
    • [00:18:49] Pat McGrew: We've seen a lot of change in the formulation of inks used in all of those categories over the last decade. We've seen them load more pigment into the inks. We've seen them change the formulations to make them friendlier to drying, friendlier to a wider range of substrates, friendlier to the inkjet heads for the inkjet devices. There's been a lot of change in what's available. 
    • [00:19:12] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of that, over the past decade, roughly we've seen a lot more latex ink come into the marketplace, particularly on the wide format side. Now it's still water based, but the pigment's encapsulated in a specific binder so that it behaves differently than a true aqueous ink.
    •  The way that it does behave allows you a little bit more substrate range, so you can start to print on more glossier type stocks. It still requires drying. It's still gets absorbed into the material, but I think the biggest advantage that, and where it found a really good place in the market was replacing some of the solvent based or even eco solvent based wide format systems. What you could immediately do, if it was printed latex, was immediately go and do a finishing process, like laminating. Or other types of things where you didn't have to worry about an off gassing effect that would cause bubbles in the laminate. 
    • [00:20:04] Pat McGrew: One of the nice things about latex is that it can add speed to your production process. 
    • It's hard to get printers to convert to new technologies. It's not something they ever really want to do. It's why new technologies tended to have a kind of a long on ramp before they really become normal.
    • Latex actually had a pretty quick adoption across the wide format industry. I think largely because of what you just mentioned about being able to print it and move it into finishing production pretty quickly and get it out the door to the client as quickly as possible.
    • If you convert your entire shop to latex from a solvent based environment, the smell changes. 
    • [00:20:47] Ryan McAbee: You don't have to worry about the environmental set up of the devices and the natural volatile organic compounds or VOCs that are associated with solvent or even eco solvent inks and quite frankly, UV too which we are going to talk about in just a second. I think the other reason latex really got adopted widely is because the price point of the devices were attractive, and then just the diversity of applications that you can print on them. Everything from labels to indoor, outdoor signage to, there's a wide range.
    • [00:21:13] Pat McGrew: It's used for everything. Yeah, you see it for everything. 
    • [00:21:16] Ryan McAbee: Moving on to the solvent inks, we covered a lot about them, but they've been around in the marketplace for a long time. Because we're trying to, as an industry and as a whole, as a society move to more environmentally friendly products, that's where eco-solvent also came into play. It's just minimizing the amount of volatile organic compounds that are in the ink itself. It's mainly used in inkjet equipment these days. It's still in the market because it does have a very wide substrate range. You can print on metal, you can print on pretty much any kind of substrate you can think about. That's why it's still very common in the marketplace. 
    • The one thing that you do have to consider though, when you do use solvent or eco solvent is that you can't immediately take that printed product if it needs certain types of finishing done, particularly lamination, because you will get that bubbling effect from the off gassing.
    • [00:22:05] Pat McGrew: One of the reasons we saw many companies start to move in the latex direction was because, in certain markets, the environmental requirements, in the shop have changed around what has to be in place for you to be able to use solvent inks in terms of the air handling systems and the off gassing systems. 25 years ago, we didn't worry too much about what it smelled like in the print shop and just how much of the solvents we were inhaling. Over the last 10 or 15 years, we've seen a lot of regulation, especially in Europe. Typically it'll start in Europe and then it'll wander across the world where they started getting very concerned about how much people were breathing in of the solvents. Eco solvents dampen that down a little bit there. They have a little bit better profile, but it's there's still work you have to do. If you're working in a shop that is using solvent based things today if you look up towards the ceiling, you may notice a lot of additional air handling that you might not see in a shop.
    • That's not using solvent things. 
    • [00:23:03] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of air handling, our last ink category here that we'll run through is UV inks. It has a very distinct smell, especially if it's being used in a offset lithography press. It's also a bit different because it's one of the few ink types where it sits on the surface. It doesn't really absorb into the substrate. And then what really makes it unique is that we don't dry it. We actually cure it. What does that really mean for From an application perspective or from a user use of that type of ink perspective Pat. 
    • [00:23:32] Pat McGrew: When you're curing, you're basically using light frequencies to stabilize the pigments in the solvent and binder that's holding the . You're basically creating a stable form. While it's in its liquid form it's unstable. You won't be able to work with it. What the curing does using light wave forms is stabilizes the pigment stabilizes the solvent and kind of solidifies it is a good way to think of it now.
    • The interesting thing is that we've had lots of changes in technologies in how you do that UV curing, right? It used to be those cute hot purple lights that, that kind of black lights, basically. 
    • [00:24:16] Ryan McAbee: Mercury arc lamps.
    • [00:24:17] Pat McGrew: And that contributed to the smell. What has happened is that over the last 15-20 years, we've seen a lot of development in curing that have migrated away from those mercury lamps towards LED curing and laser curing that change a lot of things. Changes actually the cost of curing. Those mercury lamps were expensive, and they had a very specific lifespan before you had to replace them. 
    • The laser cured UV inks are a little friendlier in terms of the cost to use them and the longevity of the curing lamp as well. 
    • [00:24:56] Ryan McAbee: It also had an impact on the substrate range because with the mercury lamps, they required, they produce more heat. If you have a thin film material or something that's susceptible to heat, that's not going to work very well. It expanded the substrate range, which is why we're writing it very high today. 
    • The other thing that the ink formulations and UV, particularly on the wide format side have happened over the recent years. There used to be saying, Oh, you'd never use uV ink where it has to stretch a lot. Now the formulations where it will stretch like 300 percent versus normal state. It can actually be used for car wraps and things these days which is pretty phenomenal. 
    • The one thing though, application wise that you really wouldn't use UV inks for today is anything that has to be food or medical safe. Even though you're curing that UV ink, it has radical, so to speak, where you can never curate a hundred percent. You don't want UV ink ending up on your food or your medicine, so it really hasn't gone into those markets. Now with that saying, maybe we'll get there. There's already been inks in the market for years that are low migration UV ink. So it basically, they're still working and fine tuning.
    • [00:26:00] Pat McGrew: They're working hard to try and get them certified. I've done several webinars with some of the experts in that space. And they are convinced they will get there. They always test in Europe to try and get the European certifications first. They look at it specifically in pharma applications. I think we will see it. 
    • There is no end of R&D in the world of Inc. There's still R&D in dye based inks. There is R&D in pigment based inks. In all of these variations, there are still new variations of paste based inks. That won't change because we continue to get new substrates into the marketplace. I remember the first time I encountered bamboo as the basis for the substrate, right? It was bamboo based paper. The inks that we had on the device I was working with simply did not stick. I had to go back to the drawing board to figure that one out.
    • That will keep on happening. I think, forever. The important thing for everybody listening to this to remember is, in whatever shop you are working in, figure out what you print. Figure out what kind of inks are used in your shop, so that you can be smarter about asking questions about drying, about re moisturizing, about the substrates that are in use.
    • Talk with your vendors about their ink formulations, and if they tell you ink formulations are changing, and they do. You buy a device you buy the you think you're done on a lot of the production devices and on a lot of the wide format devices. Those things have changed multiple times in the last 10 years. The ink formulations have changed.
    • UV is still a work in progress right. I think the latex inks are still a work in progress. We'll continue to see a lot of innovation. So keep your ears to the ground. If you start to hear them talking about a change in ink and make sure that you have a good regression testing bucket so that you can test your substrates against whatever new ink they might want you to take on.
    • [00:27:59] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, very true. You always want to be prepared and do the testing that's needed in times of changing any kind of ink set or any variable in your system of printing. With that said, thanks for joining today, Pat. I think we learned a lot in terms of introduction to the major ink types that are out in the market.
    • There's obviously many more from specialty, very narrow niche kind of inks, but this gives the good introduction to the primary ones. We hope to see you on a future episode here at The Print University.

71- Importance of Print in Today’s World

Let's bust the myths of modern day printing. Learn how the industry is everywhere, critical, and technology forward.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: I'm Pat McGrew, and I am with my best friend, Ryan McAbee, and we are The Print University. And today, we want to talk about the importance of print. As part of an introduction to production printing, and you might say of course, print's important. There's a lot more to it. And Ryan, that's what we want to walk through, just where print appears in our lives and what opportunities they bring us in the print industry.
    • [00:00:28] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, I don't know about you, Pat, but every time I try and tell someone what I do for a living, it creates confusion. 
    • [00:00:34] Pat McGrew: You mean there's an industry? Oh, there's a print what is that? 
    • [00:00:38] Ryan McAbee: It's because it's not very well defined in people's heads. Inevitably, when I mention the word printing industry or printing, people have a very narrow focus or narrow understanding of what that can be. It usually is going to, "Oh, you're talking about newspapers or books". It's usually all related to the publishing segment of our industry. Then the inevitable comment usually follows. We're like there's not as many newspapers being produced these days and all this kind of, banter that happens. What we're going to try and do in this episode is, make the point that print is really everywhere. Print comes in many different forms, flavors, and styles. It's just one of those things that you stare at it every day and it just becomes your background. You don't think that, how did this get here? And that it actually was printed, right?
    • [00:01:24] Pat McGrew: Take a couple of steps back. Look in your wallet, look in your purse, look in, whatever you carry stuff around in, and look at how much paper you carry around, even in our digital world.
    • We would like to think that everything's digital, but I promise you, if you show up at the airport, they probably want to see a piece of paper that proves you're you. 
    • [00:01:43] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, absolutely. It's it's just it's really is just simply everywhere. And like we said the everybody outside looking in thinks of this type of a picture. They think of the bookstore. They think of where the newsstand where they may still pick up their newspaper with their cup of coffee. There is this whole publishing segment that is still a vibrant. It's changed. Through the introduction of e readers and other technologies, the internet to be able to distribute information. But it's evolved, it has still found niches to grow into and still be part of the overall printing industry.
    • Also think about it from other places that we interact with on a daily, weekly, monthly type of basis. Imagine if you went into any kind of grocery store or store where you purchase things and think about what if nothing was printed.
    • Everything you see here would then either be in a brown carton or paper bag or a white paper carton bag with no description, no indication of should I trust this thing that I'm buying and who I'm buying it from? All that branding and everything that we take for granted, it gets on there because it's printed.
    • Run us through a little bit here, Pat, all the different types of printed products that we see just in this picture. 
    • [00:02:53] Pat McGrew: It's massive because from the Rold Gold pretzel bags on the right to the many kinds of wrapping and foil boxes on the left. Further down the aisle, you see the paper towels and the plastic packages containing those. 
    • I'm old enough to remember that the original version of cheap places to shop right for discount food stores. A lot of times, their approach was to put everything in white boxes with a black thing, like foil or, plastic wrap or whatever. When you walked into the store, it was the most unpleasant of experiences because everything looked the same. It was very hard to distinguish one thing from another. It really, it was really hard. 
    • That approach largely failed because we rely as consumers on the brands that we trust. We rely on color to guide us. We rely on shape to guide us. And that's where print comes in the branding colors. Would a Hershey's chocolate bar taste the same if it was in a brown, a plain brown paper wrapper that just said chocolate on it?
    • [00:04:02] Ryan McAbee: It probably would, but you wouldn't know to buy it. 
    • [00:04:04] Pat McGrew: Theoretically, yeah, but you wouldn't know to buy it, right? The thing that you have to remember as you're walking up and down the aisle, whether you're, at a big box store, or you're at your local grocery store, or even your hyper local grocery, right? Print is part of your life, because something has to tell you what that stuff costs, whether it's a sign hanging over them, or it's a label tag on a shelf. 
    • Print is how the business world communicates to consumers, how they interact with the product, what the product costs, and how to use the product.
    •  Imagine being sent your doctor sends you a prescription and it just comes in a brown paper bag and you get to guess how much you're supposed to take, how often, and what side effects it might have, right? The value of print is that's how we communicate when we can't and especially when we can't be there in person.
    • Greeting cards are print. So sending the Christmas cards or the Hanukkah cards or the Kwanzaa cards, right? Birthday cards graduation cards, all those things, that's all print. It's a way to communicate. 
    • [00:05:08] Ryan McAbee: When we're talking about the publishing space, there's a bigger universe there of document based printing. This that we're looking at now is largely the domain of packaging. There's, the four pillars of packaging that we normally focus on, which is folding carton. Think of your cereal boxes. Think of the glad wrap box that you see on the shelf here. There's also a flexible packaging. I don't know if there's a one on the screen that the Rold Gold would probably be 
    • [00:05:30] Pat McGrew: the rolled gold is flexible packaging. Yeah. And it can come in a lot of different substrates.
    • [00:05:34] Ryan McAbee: Then you have labels which is its own big category in and of itself. Then corrugated would be the last one, like the point of purchase display that those exactly sitting on. That's packaging. 
    • Another area that's really definitely not in the public, how the public thinks about printing, but it's certainly there, is more of an industrial type printing.
    •  I like to point out what in your home may not actually be what it looks like. It may be printed to look that way. Ceramic tiles are one of those interesting ones where the majority of them today are digitally printed. But there's other things that you might see on your cabinets, for instance, that that's probably a laminate printed to look like wood, but not actually the real grain of the wood. There could also be wall graphics that you use in your home. There's, there could be printed forms of textiles, wall covering, everything. 
    • [00:06:18] Pat McGrew: That is a whole industry unto itself because there are people who specialize in creating printed wallpaper to make something match something that was there that might have been damaged, right?
    • There are people who specialize in creating floor tiles to match things that might have been damaged, especially in a restoration kind of work. When we bought the house that I live in right now, a friend of a mutual friend of ours came and as he walked through the house, he kept going, "Oh, and that's printed. And that's printed and that's printed." So my kitchen cabinets are printed. Yes, they are. The countertop is printed. Yes, it is. The floors are printed. Yes, they are. Because that has become the way that we've been able to add so much variety to the our homes.
    • It's murals for behind my bed or all sorts of, full wall graphics that used to only a bit be available in industrial settings. Today, I can buy that from an online print provider and have it delivered to my house next week to install, on a bedroom wall.
    • It doesn't take an industrial application to be able to take advantage of what print can do for you to customize your living experience. 
    • [00:07:34] Ryan McAbee: A lot of times there's a perception or myth will say that printing isn't green. It doesn't have the sustainability aspects. But I think the ceramic tile situation and also with textile printing that's going on digitally these days, those are two really good use cases where print is actually a greener process than what came before it. It's using less, in the case of ceramic tile, it's using less VOCs, organic compounds and chemicals that are not what you want the environment. Then with the textile space, it's doing that, but it's also greatly reducing the amount of water consumption that's needed to actually make those textiles. And waste and waste. 
    • The other kind of area that we have in this, I'll label this kind of the signage realm of printing, but think about when you go to any kind of sporting event here, we obviously have probably a NASCAR type races, my guess.
    • [00:08:21] Pat McGrew: That it would be a NASCAR race.
    • [00:08:23] Ryan McAbee: You would know more than I would. In this picture, we have a little bit of things that we can talk about. So you could have car wraps, which these have done. You have some window decals, some kind of stickers, vinyls, that sort of thing. If you think about the stadium where this event or any kind of event will be taking place, you have a lot of signage to tell you where things are, how to get there. You have people that go to these events, bring their pop up tents that are printed probably with their favorite. NASCAR driver or favorite athlete or whatever the case is. 
    • [00:08:53] Pat McGrew: Sponsor signage is all over the place. It's hanging from fences, it's on pull ups, it's hanging from things. 
    • Yeah, there's a lot of it.
    • [00:09:01] Ryan McAbee: Again, print is really in all these kinds of environments. The other thing to think about is again back to the packaging kind of realm is that think about if you went to go pick up your favorite fast food or your food from your favorite restaurant and it came looking like this you don't see that too often these days where it's just very generic packaging.
    • [00:09:20] Pat McGrew: I was thinking about that, during COVID, when a lot of restaurants had to very quickly get into the takeout business when they hadn't been in it before, all any of us could buy were these brown paper sacks and brown paper boxes and brown paper cups. That was all you could buy. You had no ability to differentiate yourself.
    • What we noticed in our refrigerator is that everything looked The same. We didn't buy a lot of takeout, but when we did it all, the leftovers all look the same in the refrigerator and go, "Oh." All of a sudden you realize the value one to figure out 
    • Waat's this?
    • And even today, think about your reaction when somebody hands you something in a plain brown paper bag. It's not the same as if they hand it to you in a printed gift bag or even a bag from a retailer. That Tiffany blue bag has real meaning if you're handing over a gift with it. A bag that has their logo on it, the recipient knows what they're getting, but it's also a walking billboard, right?
    • The power of print is that you make more things a walking billboard for the service or the product that's being provided. 
    • [00:10:30] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of walking billboard, the other place that Us in the industry see a lot of print is at our trade events that happens 
    • [00:10:37] Pat McGrew: trade show printing yeah 
    • [00:10:39] Ryan McAbee: It's been interesting to see how that's involved over the years. Prior to probably five plus years ago it wasn't uncommon to have heavier PVC type signage it had more weight in heft so shipping costs and logistics costs to get it there and put it up was a lot more. Now, these are more soft fabrics that like the sign that you see the circle.
    • [00:10:58] Pat McGrew: A lot of times they're actually printed ahead of the show and mount it. There is not the requirement to print in a location, roll it up and ship it all the time. While some organizations will still do that some have gotten very green about, " hey, if we make the machine that does this kind of printing, we might as well print the sign when we get there when we set up the machine and install it in the way we go." That not only tells a great use case story, but it is a greener approach to the shows. 
    • If you just look in this picture, you've got that fabric sign, the circular sign at the top, that's all fabric. If you look in the back where it says Kornit Digital "go with digital, grow with digital", that is a fabric on a light stand that, that actually it glows through the back. You'll see some foam core in the back there. Honestly, that is the power of print is we have so many different substrates, so many different things we can print on. We can print on rolls of things. We can print on flat things. We can print on round things. I had somebody asking the other day about printing on paper cups, right? Yes, you can. Remember trade shows happen outside the print industry, Ryan. I didn't know if you know that...
    • [00:12:08] Ryan McAbee: but the largest ones are electronics based like CES and everything and the consumer. 
    • [00:12:13] Pat McGrew: Electronic shows are amazing. Think about car shows and boat shows or the home decor shows that might be at your local convention center. Think about every industry that you serve with print. They all have their own trade shows. A friend of ours just came back from a Re/max real estate convention.
    • Okay, trade show. 
    • [00:12:32] Ryan McAbee: I've got a good one for you, actually. I was talking to a gentleman this past week and never even knew this kind of thing existed. He was describing to me that he collects, and apparently there's a big market for this because they have an annual trade show, multiple ones actually, it's nostalgic or old beer cans.
    • There's that that much of a need. 
    • [00:12:51] Pat McGrew: That's a thing. 
    • [00:12:51] Ryan McAbee: Has a thing. Apparently, that's enough to support a trade event multiple times a year, 
    • [00:12:55] Pat McGrew: I wish I had my dad's old Schlitz beer cans. 
    • [00:12:58] Ryan McAbee: There you go. 
    • [00:12:59] Pat McGrew: But even like you think about real estate you think about manufacturing.
    • I have been at a trade show that does tower cranes. They have their own trade show, right? So all of these shows and there are a lot of printers who specifically have that as a niche supporting trade shows. A lot of times you'll find those printers located close to convention centers so that they can serve immediate needs as well as, long term needs.
    • Those table tents and the wall graphics are just part of it. The pop up tents. I've seen people use pop up tents as their display in a trade show . And remember, if it's a surface, it can be a billboard.
    • [00:13:37] Ryan McAbee: Let's flip this around a little bit at this point. So obviously we've given you every way that print is this big universe, and it's really all everywhere around us. But if you're not like us, and you're thinking about getting into this industry, or you're curious about what this industry is, let's give, let's take that point of view. It is a large industry globally. One of the research firms, Smithers forecast it to be around 834 billion. So a little less than a trillion by 2026. The reason it probably doesn't have the resonance or the name recognition that other industries like the technology field has is because we're very fragmented. The largest providers of print, some examples on the screen here, Westrock, which we had talked about in previous episodes they had revenue return over about 21. 2 billion. You compare and contrast that with something like a Google, for instance, and it's not, they're not in the same capacity, right? 
    • [00:14:28] Pat McGrew: Drop in the bucket. 
    • [00:14:29] Ryan McAbee: We have a many printers across the globe, but they tend to be a smaller entities compared to some other industries like healthcare or big pharma or technology. But it still is a big industry in its whole totality because it touches everything. 
    • [00:14:43] Pat McGrew: Yeah, it really does. There is almost nothing you can do that doesn't require print at some point in your relationship with it. 
    • [00:14:50] Ryan McAbee: I'm going to take the myth side and then you can dispel it with some of the facts, but the things that we hear is that, oh, it's a, Print is a relevant manufacturing industry. It's a dirty industry. It's old school. It's not high tech. I'm going to be working in a factory that smells or it's only manufacturing jobs. And, it's not really a growth opportunity, but in reality, I think from both our perspectives, we would counter that.
    • It's every one of those points and say, it's actually the opposite of that. 
    • [00:15:18] Pat McGrew: More and more, it used to be 30 years ago when I would walk into a print shop, you could smell ink, and if you looked around people, had a lot of ink smeared on their clothing and the floors weren't particularly pristine, it was very manufacturing feeling. As we've come into the new millennium and really for the last 20 some years, what I have noticed is that most shops I walk into, you could eat off the floor. They are absolutely drop dead clean and they have to be because they've been slowly but surely bringing in technology to automate a lot of the features and functions of the work that they do.
    • What the one that you're seeing on the screen here. is from Blue Crest, and it's called Ottomate, and this is very specifically a robotic system to grab envelopes that have had stuff inserted in them, have been sealed, and now they need to get into mailing trays. One of the things that used to happen is that a person did that. They were literally grabbing things and putting things into the mail tray, and people You know, they might drop one. They might drop an envelope. They might get it into the wrong tray. Maybe they aren't compressing it as much because, they're tired and it's the end of the day. Maybe that tray goes out only three quarters full or something, right?
    • When you start introducing robotic technology into some of these manual labor. When you start bringing it in, all of a sudden, you can do a couple of things. One, you can relieve that person from the menial task, from the manual labor, and use them in something that's more fulfilling and rewarding.
    • The other thing you could do is you can be more efficient. So one of the things that happens with Ottomate is that he can actually put more envelopes into a mail tray than a person can because he compresses it. What's that really mean for the business? It means they need fewer mail trays. It means they're more efficient in getting the finished envelopes into that mail tray and off into the postal part of that envelope's adventure.
    •  We see this throughout the industry right now, the application of robotic arms, robotic pallet movers. Taking the manual labor off of people basically, and putting it into machines and letting people do the things people do best, which is solve problems and deal with customers and the more creative aspects of getting the work out the door.
    • Today, print is one of the most technology driven industries you can possibly work in. It's right up there with car manufacturing. Right? 
    • [00:17:51] Ryan McAbee: The reality is we've been on that trajectory since the early eighties. Pretty much since the dawn of desktop publishing, we've been on a push industry wide for technology and being technology driven.
    • I think what you were describing with Ottomate and many other technologies that are coming out more recently is that now we're getting more technology focused there and more automation to take the labor component out of manufacturing as we go forward. And we'll continue to see more of that. 
    • The other thing I was thinking about this earlier today is that the thing that I find so unique about the printing industry. And if you ever met me, I probably asked you how you got into the industry. You will get so many diverse answers into what people thought they were going to be doing in terms of their profession and how they ended up in the printing industry. Whether you were a fine art major, whether you were a mechanical engineer, whether a musician. I've had every kind of response you can imagine.
    • What that really speaks to is that there are roles inside of the printing industry that fit with every type of personality, every type of thing that you may be good at. If you are highly technical and you're more mechanically inclined you would do well in an operations kind of role where you're needing to think about how to fit these things mechanically together and how the actual shop floor production happens if you're more mathematically inclined or attention to detail, being an estimator and using the print management system would be a wonderful role for you. If you're more gregarious and outspoken, maybe that's more of a sales or a customer service type role where you're engaging with people all the time.
    •  There really is such a diverse range of functions that we have in the printing industry, that's why when I ask people that question, you get all kinds of interesting responses. 
    • [00:19:35] Pat McGrew: It's not surprising. Also, the number of people we talked to who came in through their families, right?
    • Sometimes the family owns a printing shop and the kids swear they're never going to come into it. They get sent off to get their MBAs and their shiny degrees, but an amazing number of them come back into the business. What they discover is that The print industry encompasses everything that you can imagine.
    • It's math related. It's creative related. It's automation related. It's a chance to play with robots. It's a chance to talk to people. It's a chance to have a slightly different experience every day of your working life. And that makes it really interesting. The print industry, it is a manufacturing industry and that makes it really diverse. 
    • Yeah and interesting, to be honest. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We hope you have a greater understanding of the wide world of printing and how you may participate in it going forward.
    •  Hope to see you here on a future episode at The Printing University.

72- Careers in Print: Pre-production

A print shop if full of superheroes that get the work done every day. We explore key roles required before print jobs hit the production floor. This episode is for those thinking of starting a career in print. It is equally useful for those already working in print so they can gain a better understanding of other roles and opportunities.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition of The Print University. Today, we are going to be talking about careers in print, specifically for the front of the house or what we call pre production. Joined by Pat McGrew, as always. Pat, I know that you have a lot of restaurant experience. Front of the house versus back of the house.
    • Educate us on what that kind of is for people that aren't familiar with that kind of terminology, because I think it applies here, too. 
    • [00:00:26] Pat McGrew: It does. Think about your McDonald's, right? You're going to go into a fast food place and there's everything that's behind the counter. It's all the people who are making your hamburgers or your fish sandwich or your chicken nuggets, your milkshakes, whatever, right?
    • That's the back of the house. You're no you're McRib. Yeah, you're lovely McRib. They're the people who are serving you. They're the back of the house front of the house is everything on the other side of the counter. It's where people are sitting. It needs to be cleaned up things like that in a typical restaurant.
    • It works the same way. We have our kitchen and our kitchen staff who make the lovely food and, make the drinks and stuff front of house. Is everything that's customer facing your print shops the exact same thing and people laugh at me when I make analogies between restaurants and print shops.
    • But honestly, we have workflow conversations with our cooks. So it's because it's all about raw materials turning into a final product. And so the back of house of a print shop is full of these people who are making stuff happen. These are the people who ensure that the file things that are sold, jobs that are sold that the files arrive or that the specifications are delivered.
    • So we can be designed that it goes through every 1 of the processes. And these people are superheroes. I promise you, you get your cape every single day. If you have if you are a printer or if you are new to a print shop, I promise you, you get your cape shortly. If you don't have one already, I'm sure it's in the mail because you are.
    • You are charged with doing a lot of things that you probably never realized were part of the job. 
    • [00:02:06] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, and that's an interesting thing to point out about this episode. It could be, if you're watching it and you're not inside the printing industry, this will give you an idea of kind of what who does what.
    • If you're already inside of a print shop, this will give you an idea of hey maybe You know, that kind of role sounds interesting. Maybe I'll try and, migrate over to that at some point. 
    • [00:02:26] Pat McGrew: Might help you understand what the people you're working with are doing too. And sometimes we assume things about the different jobs in a print shop.
    • We assume we know what a CSR does. We assume that we know what the salesperson does. We assume that we know what all these roles do, but often we're not actually right. 
    • [00:02:45] Ryan McAbee: That's right. Because unless your shoes are being filled in that role, it's hard to really know without you walking a mile in their shoes, so to speak.
    • So we're talking about the front of the house. This kind of is a org chart of what a typical company may look like. When you have the chief sales officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, chief technology officer, and chief people officer. That's a lot of chiefs. Basically that would be in larger establishments when you get down to, a mom and pop print shop, all those kinds of functions, they compress and people are doing multiple things typically.
    •  Regardless, you do have some key roles across the board. There's usually some kind of sales component involved. Now that's Salesperson could be the owner. If it's a really small shop, it could be inside sales where it's mainly telephone based sales. It could be external sales and they could be 1 person or it could be 25 people. It just depends on the size and scale of the business. 
    •  That's definitely the administrative part, the management part, the sales aspect, and also the customer service roles. Anybody that basically interfaces with the customer before it becomes a job in the shop, that's what we consider pre production.
    •  We have about four key roles here, Pat, that we're going to walk through. We're going to put that superhero cape on and we're going to say what superpowers these people need based on our experience that we've worked with them in the past. So it's going to be a fun episode.
    • [00:04:02] Pat McGrew: We're going to start with sales. We're going to start with sales because even though we don't identify them as pre production, if somebody's not out selling, you don't have any work to do. And the thing is that even in a pure web to print environment, if you're a pure online sales printer, that the sales role typically still exists from the standpoint That someone is responsible for understanding what is being sold, coordinating how things will be priced, understanding who the target market is, because not every printer serves every market.
    • Some very specifically serve, say, trade events or education or government or manufacturing. There are all sorts of specialties, although there are general commercial printers who serve. A variety of niches, which means that when you have a salesperson boy, this person they've got to be a detective.
    • They have to understand all the personalities of all the different people who they are trying to sell to. And if you think about the people in your own life, think about maybe your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles, your teachers the people you bowl with the people who are on the sidelines of your kid's little league.
    • Games these that you would immediately identify a lot of personality types and they all exist in the print universe as well as buyers and these buyers need to be handled differently. Very often they have different needs, different wants, different expectations based on their own demands, the demands of their organizations.
    • So we need somebody who is good at reading people. It becomes really important to be able to read the person, whether they're on the other end of the phone, the other end of an email, or you're sitting across the desk from them, it's important to be able to read between the lines, and that means really active listening, and if you don't know what active listening is look it up in your favorite search engine, because it is a very specific style of listening that encourages you to really listen to the words, but also listen to how they're being said, And how they're relevant to the conversation, the worst thing that any salesperson, no matter what they're selling can do is not really listen to the person who's trying to buy from them that imagine going into a car dealer and say what I really need is, SUV.
    • I've got 2 kids. I got car seats. I got to be able to handle 3 adults, 2 kids strollers. And the first thing is perfect for you. Yeah. Or the, the two door sedan, right? Where you're gonna be trying to haul car seats outta the, from behind the the front seats and the passenger seats.
    • So that's, think about those experiences and that's what you don't ever wanna happen when you're selling. So I think of it in terms of rivaling Sherlock Holmes, right? The persona of Sherlock Holmes was always that. He didn't actively look at things, but he absorbed everything. He could tell that a door had been unlocked with a lockpick because he could see the scratches.
    • And so that led him to certain assumptions. He knew how many steps it took to get from place A to place B. And if somebody said, Oh, I was there in 30 seconds and he knew it couldn't be done, it gave him some leads. You're doing the same thing. You're listening to what a customer says they want. But then you need to bring your expertise to the table to help them understand what's possible.
    • And that means you have to be able to tell them stories about why what you're offering them is what they really want, as opposed to what they might have vocalized. And it's a high pressure job. 
    • [00:07:39] Ryan McAbee: Yeah it's that active, it's understanding the person across from the table, across the email, across the zoom, which is more and more common these days for what I'm hearing from the sales folks that it it's really lessened the in person aspect because of what we went through in the past few years and then knowing how to speak to that personality.
    • So this goes into if you, your assessment profiles to understand if they're a high D, if it's a disc assessment, all that kind of stuff, but then it's that, that active listening to that. That's that reaffirmation. So you have to retell what you're hearing to them to confirm that's what they want.
    • But then that's that deductive reasoning. Is that really what they want or it's probably something else. Let me suggest that. And then being able to really, and this is really the art to this role is the storytelling aspect because you want to be able to know your products, your capabilities inside of your print shop of what you're offering and can offer.
    • And basically present that in a, almost a story format so that they can understand exactly with you and you can captivate them and say, this is it. 
    • [00:08:36] Pat McGrew: And you want to be able to help them understand other possibilities than what they might've thought of. And you might call it upselling, but at the end of the day, it's really right selling.
    • It's making sure that the product that they're that they finally agree with you on is the product that's going to move their print requirement as far forward as possible their communication issue as far forward. So it might be that they come to you asking for a specific size sign. But they've never actually measured where that sign supposed to go.
    • They've actually not thought about the purpose of the sign your requirements for design are different. If it's 1 of those feather signs, planted in a grassy verge versus something hanging off the side of your building or on a billboard direct mail comes in all sizes, shapes and forms and has different purposes.
    • So all these things need to be part of it. So master storyteller, if there was only one thing that I looked for, I bet that the number one thing I looked for in a salesperson, if I was hiring, I want that ability to tell a story. Sell me ice if I'm sitting in Alaska. 
    • [00:09:41] Ryan McAbee: And to remove the jargon and the layers of that, that are confusing to anybody outside the industry too, because we're guilty of that a lot inside of the industry with as all industries 
    • [00:09:50] Pat McGrew: are, right?
    • Many printers say, Oh I got this four over four job in. Did you really? And so unfortunately in the current model of most print buyers, many of them would have no idea what you were saying. Yeah, absolutely. And if you don't know what it is, it means for color on both sides of the page.
    • And that really 
    • leads 
    • [00:10:07] Ryan McAbee: us to the next person in the chain of events, typically, and that's the customer support representative. And boy, do these people wear a lot of hats in the shop because not only are they. Tasked with interpreting and confirming what the client wanted that they communicated to the salesperson and then the salesperson relaying that internally, probably to the customer support representative, but they're also the helicopter hovering at 10, 000 feet from that.
    • Order as it's coming in all the way through to make sure that it's delivered and gets out the door on time and handling all that client interactions when the client emails, phones up, whatever, says, where's my job? They're the ones that are fielding that kind of question questions that come in. And so they have to definitely be on their feet, multitasker to the nth degree.
    • And they really typically are. More of those people personalities a little bit more extroverted than introverted probably just because you're having to communicate so much with not only the internal staff in the print shop, but also the external clients and vendors and whoever else you may need to in the course of the work.
    • [00:11:16] Pat McGrew: This is a role that won't go away. Even in full end to end workflow automation, there will always be a requirement for a CSR because very often they're the person who needs to translate out of salesperson into actual production capability. These are the people who are the they're the EMTs of the shop.
    • They're the ones who were sent. To find missing pieces to resolve problems. Oh, it got put into our automated workflow, but we just realized that we sent the wrong file or the customer realizes that something has happened that makes it impossible for them to allow that job to go. These are the people who will.
    • Get into the systems, make sure that things are done the way they need to be done. We've we've been in many shops, Ryan, you and I, where the details of the CSRs would make a feature length motion pictures. We had a CSR once tell us that it takes her anywhere from. 10 hours to translate what the sales people give them and get it into their print MIS system because every salesperson has their own shorthand and their own way of doing it and they've been doing it that way 25 years and they have no plans to change and we've been in shops where the CSRs are that they're the combination educator, mom, dad, and I don't know what else they and say is sometimes salesperson too, because sometimes they're the ones having the conversation with a customer because a salesperson sold something that they don't actually do.
    • And the CSR takes on the role of trying to solve that problem so that they still can keep the job. Yeah, these, a CSR in the best circumstances are the people who know your shop end to end up to down back to sideways training new CSRs. It's time consuming because it's very hard to create the best CSR using the baptism by fire approach.
    • Typically, they really do need to shadow a CSR for some time. And sometimes the best way to train them is to have them spend some time in every role in the shop before they take up their position at the CSR desk. 
    • [00:13:30] Ryan McAbee: That's an interesting thing you just pointed out because it's a great comparison to an air traffic controller.
    • And that's exactly how they train. When you go to ATC schools, it's called you're getting simulated environments to learn how to use the tool sets and all this kind of stuff. So that's like you said, walking in under and maybe working in the different divisions inside of a print shop.
    • At our departments and then also they do that shadowing aspect. So they have an experienced ATC person hovering over the shoulder as they're presenting these different scenarios and stuff. So it's very analogous. The the other thing that when it comes to customer support person, and this is more for a print shop owner.
    • I, it's my personal opinion that there's a high correlation with the number of steps on a pedometer that a CSR takes in a day, the higher you get, the less automated and the more processes that you need to have in place because you don't versus one that's on the lower end of a pedometer reading because they have systems in place, they have processes in place, so they don't need to get up and move to physically check things.
    • So just my theory, you might want to test it out. 
    • [00:14:34] Pat McGrew: I think that's a really good point. The more they're walking around well. This is, at the point where wireless headsets became available, we saw CSR has acquired those that was one of the 1st buys because it made it possible for them to keep on talking to people while they were walking through a shop.
    • I don't know that was good, but at the end of the day, the more you can automate your processes, the better off you are, but. I know that it will be that there's a long tail to getting every print shop in the world automated. So this is a role that's going to be imperative and just requires really great training and respect 
    • [00:15:10] Ryan McAbee: to.
    • Yeah, absolutely. Moving on. We have an estimated role. Now, this is one of those roles inside of the printing world that it's just getting more challenging to find people who are experts in this role who want to be in this role. And really, it's those people that are fantastic with numbers. They know the 10th decimal.
    • That's not me. By the way, I can tell you beyond 3. 14. I think it's the 1st 3 and that's all I can do. But it's really those, the people that have the attention to detail. They're good with numbers and what they're really doing in their functional role is they're taking that information from the sales people and the customer support representatives and they're feeding it into a print management system that is aware of all of the costs that you have in a print production site.
    • That's everything from the equipment to the labor, to the materials that are going to be used. And they're using that tool, that print management tool or print MIS solution or ERP, you have different names. They're putting the request that came in from the client into an official estimate that then they'll click another button and turn it into a quote that gets sent back to the customer that has all the detail with the pricing.
    • And that's how the customer makes the determination to know whether they want to proceed and go forward or not. So what other kind of key superpowers do you see in this estimator role? 
    • [00:16:28] Pat McGrew: So think about that. Estimator needs to know if the system is failing him or her, because sometimes you'll look at what comes back from the estimation program, and it just doesn't feel right.
    • The price looks too high. It looks too low. Something is just not right. And in those cases, if you don't have that person with these superpowers, if you don't have those interpretive skills, equivalent or rivaling Sherlock Holmes, a job can be pushed out, a quote can be pushed out, it causes you to lose money, or it causes you to bid too high for the work, and as a result you lose it, right?
    • So those are the things that it requires not just that number crunching, but that emotional intelligence to know when something doesn't look right and something might not look right. Because in the inventory management system, if it is not being updated in an automated way. If every time new pallets of paper or rolls of paper come in, that data is not captured and automatically fed into the inventory management system, and it's not automatically shared with the estimating system.
    • Maybe somebody put a number in, and maybe that number isn't correct. Maybe they're off a decimal point. Maybe they're off, they typed in seven, and it should have been a one. Right there, there are all sorts of things that can happen, especially when manual data entry is involved. But even when it's automated, if.
    • A mistake was made by the paper merchant and how they delivered the data and it happens because people are people and things happen that the wrong information can be entering your estimating system. So this person has to be confident enough in their understanding of the processes that will be applied to the job and the.
    • Job print time, the substrates, the use of ink or toner, embellishment, finishing, all of those things to be able to say, Nope, that number's wrong. We need to go back and redo this. So they are a critical piece and they are basically the gatekeepers to your profitability. 
    • [00:18:37] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. And what you're talking about is experience with kind of a gut feeling interaction.
    • And, it can be even that the, maybe the system's not incorrect, but if you think about it some of these estimates can get quite complex because we're talking about many different pieces that are going on to the same estimate. So they may have requested brochures and flyers and a wide format poster and a stand to put it on and all these different components.
    • And it may just be that they, they realize, Oh, that price It doesn't look exactly right. Oh, I forgot to add one of the components to the estimate, that sort of thing. So you're absolutely right. Accuracy is key in this role. And that's why it's really a detail oriented role is one of the superpowers here, but also just being a well versed in numbers and liking that sort of thing.
    • That leads us to the next logical place in the pre-production world, and that's with a scheduler slash planner. Now, they often, these terms are interchangeable. A scheduler would basically be doing the function like on the board. And many places still use a physical board like this, but it's literally moving the job.
    • From department to department saying, yes, we've now finished in prepress is now heading to printing and so forth. A planner is a little bit before that step because they're making sure that you have the resources particularly materials But also the equipment is available and the people are available to run that equipment They're planning to make sure you have those in place before they actually hit the production floor and the schedule So that you're not saying, oh, where's the paper?
    • I can't run this job now. So now we've got to shift the schedule around. So those are the two distinct roles, but there's a lot of different superpowers in this role as well. And this is a skill set also that's getting harder to really hire 
    • [00:20:17] Pat McGrew: for. It is because it requires someone with. A strong but friendly personality.
    • This is someone who has to be able to get along with everyone from the salesperson to the CSR to the production staff because things happen. Machines break down no matter how tightly the planner has scheduled. If something breaks, if a machine goes down, if something happens, it's back to the drawing board.
    • Right? And any time you can't get a job out on time, there, there's an issue, right? That there's a customer satisfaction issue. There may be penalties. There are all sorts of other things that come up. So when we say that their job is to make order out of chaos, we're not kidding because think about the multiple streams, even a shop that might have only 10 orders coming in a day.
    • They're still having to juggle those, get it printed. Get it finished, get it packaged up for delivery, right? There's a lot of work that gets done there. And excuse me, so that the planner and the scheduler both have to be masters of the equipment available to them. They have to understand print speeds.
    • They have to understand, substrate that a print speed on a given press might be different for heavyweight paper than lightweight paper. The same with finishing. Finishing lightweight paper might be slower than finishing middleweight paper. Heavier weight paper might go back to being a little bit slower.
    • How many processes does it have to go through? Does it have to be folded, creased, perfed grommeted grilled, what all has to happen to it? And they have to understand how much time those processes will take for the size of the order that's being placed and they have to do something.
    • That's even more delicate. They participate in the process to decide how much overage to create. And very often that is a coordinated conversation between, the estimator, the CSR, the salesperson, the scheduler and the planner, but most print jobs do print some overage and you want to minimize it, but you probably need to do it.
    • If you are worried about things wrecking and finishing, that's like the most common reason that you need some print overage and that is it becomes an art and a science to try and figure that out for a given type of print job for a given customer, depending on how you know how they handle their approvals.
    • [00:22:47] Ryan McAbee: And just to explain print overs a little bit, it's where you're running more quantities than you actually, the customer requested and that you need to satisfy the request because, like Pat mentioned each finishing process after you get done printing, whether it's cutting, creasing, folding, stitching, all these other things, they require a minimum number of sheets to set the equipment up to make sure it's being finished correctly for that single step.
    • So the estimator role that we talked about just before, The management tool, the ManitPrint MIS or ERP, it will spit out a number for overages that it thinks is required, but ultimately it's the people on the shop floor and the scheduler planner that will say, you know what, we don't probably need a thousand over, we can get by with 500 or whatever the case may be.
    • So and they tend to 
    • [00:23:34] Pat McGrew: know the condition of the equipment. Like one of the things that I've seen happen frequently enough that it's worth mentioning is especially when you're cutting paper. Blades wear out. They're not forever, right? And one of the things I have seen happen is blades get duller and duller, causing kind of wrecks and finishing where things have to be reprinted because the cut's not clean.
    • It's especially painful if there isn't a spare blade around. So that's where again, making sure that all your inventory process is not just your inbound substrates and ink or toner. It's also the other consumables that are part and parcel of the print process. It might be cleaning fluids for the press that are required in order to keep print heads healthy in an environment or just your presses clean in an offset environment.
    • And it's again the things that the that the finishing equipment need. So there, there are lots of things that can happen and the schedule scheduler plan, or the reason I say they have to be an enforcer with a smile is because they're responsible for making sure that work gets out the door and that the full capacity of the machines is used as best as possible.
    • So these people would need to be held accountable if you had. Scheduling on top of one another, Oh this job was supposed to have been done already. And this job is scheduled to come in next. But this one's only halfway done. Why is that some mistake was made in the decision for how long that job was supposed to take?
    • That's why these people have superpowers. They need to know how long things are going to take under the best and the worst possible circumstances. And that's learned. It again, it's art and it's science. And when we say they are fitting 10 gallons into a five gallon bucket, they do it every day.
    • [00:25:26] Ryan McAbee: They certainly do. And the other thing superpower wise that I don't know if we touched on specifically, but they have to understand the order of the universe. And what we mean by that is that every job and it's unique job to job, right? Order to order. That it has a very specific flow and specific processes that are required for it and it alone.
    • Is it going to go to printing or is it going to jump to cutting first? Or, after it gets printed, is it going to cut, fold, and stitch? Or, is it going to go in some other order with some other equation? So they really have to understand the capabilities that you have from a production standpoint and understand how those fit in and interrelate to each other.
    • And then of course, probably the biggest super power of all that they have is that they magically have to figure out how to stretch time. And that's either pulling a little bit from this job time that was allocated for this job and dedicating to the other one, raising the flag when there has to be overtime hours where people have to stay over to finish certain work so that you can meet deadlines.
    • So that really is 
    • [00:26:29] Pat McGrew: every understanding the cost that brings right? Because overtime isn't free. The other thing I think Ryan is worth mentioning is that this is a harder and harder job every year because the equipment. Is getting faster, but it's not getting faster, all at the same time. Presses are getting faster.
    • And today, you can run at 1000 feet per minute on a digital press when a few years back, the best you might have done was 500 feet a minute. If you look at finishing equipment, you might have a mix of older and newer finishing equipment in your shop. You have to know which Piece of equipment you intend to be scheduling for so that you can do the timing correctly, right?
    • There are, there's a lot of moving parts and that's that ability to stretch and compress time and juggle things. So they get out the door and sometimes knowing when you're going to have to send something out of house to get completed to meet your 
    • [00:27:28] Ryan McAbee: deadlines. That's true. Called outsourcing is how we typically refer to that.
    • The other component equipment has changed in his capabilities and speed, which means they have more capacity, more throughput, which means you can print more in a day. But the other thing that's really changed for the scheduler aspect too. And the reason you're going to need more. Computer assistance there in automation is because think about it.
    • We've, we went from an era where an average job was 10, 000 plus sheets or whatever the big quantity was now with all the digital transformation and stuff, we can profitably be print, hundreds of sheets or a book of one or whatever the K the thing is. And so we have a lot. The higher number of orders coming through and that's, that causes more of a scheduling lift or effort because instead of dealing with 10 jobs in a day, you're dealing with a hundred jobs in the same day, but you still have to figure out how to get them all out the door at the end.
    • [00:28:22] Pat McGrew: And in some cases the scheduler planner people will also be responsible for batching smaller jobs together on like substrates using like finishing in order to best use the capacity that's available and that takes some training to know how to do and it takes an understanding of some tools to do it and it also takes vigilance to make sure that the batches actually execute the way you expect them to.
    • [00:28:50] Ryan McAbee: That, those are our superhero roles inside of the pre production part of a print shop. We hope you join us in a future episode where we'll talk about the actual superhero roles inside of production that will air in a couple of months. Thanks for joining us.

74 - CAREERS IN PRINT: PRODUCTION

A print shop is full of superheroes that get the work done every day. We explore key roles required after print jobs hit the production floor. This episode is for those thinking of starting a career in print. It is equally useful for those already working in print so they can gain a better understanding of other roles and opportunities on the production floor.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, welcome to introduction to production printing careers in print. This is the production edition, and we hope that you had a chance to see the previous edition where we talked about the pre press area. We talked about the roles and the superpowers but Ryan McAbee my partner and myself, Pat McGrew, we're here this time to share some of the wisdom that we have picked up over decades. That really talks to the roles of the people in the print shop. We talk about it as having superpowers, Ryan, because frankly, every single person, every single day, in every single print shop, everywhere in the world, becomes a hero at some point during the day. 
    • [00:00:46] Ryan McAbee: It's heroic that, a print shop can do and get the work out that it does in a day and that's across the board, right?
    •  There's demands from clients the clients. They come in with all kind of changes at the last minute. You have to figure out how to shuffle it around how to move other jobs out of the way so that you can get this rush order through so it definitely is a very hero driven kind of business in many aspects. What you're looking at here though is a org chart for kind of a typical business So you have that kind of C level suite with all the C acronyms up top.
    •  If you're a small printer that might be compressed into a couple of roles and the owner might do a lot of those kinds of functions. What we're really talking about and focusing in on here is under that column where it says the chief operating officer or operations director and inside of that, you'll see production managers and then pre press and equipment operators and warehouse operator.
    • That is the production. These are the people that are literally on the shop. Inside of your print shop where you see all the equipment and the warehouse and all of this kind of stuff. So we're going to start off with our first superhero here, which is the print operations managers. So what superpowers do we see there, Pat?,
    • [00:01:52] Pat McGrew: This is combination air traffic controller, agency traffic manager, shepard, conductor that they are the people who are watching every aspect of print jobs as they come in, and as they move through the process. When we say that they keep the train moving like a conductor, we're not kidding, because.
    • There are so many moving parts to a print job not just the substrates and the consumables that go into the actual printing piece, but getting the files prepped. Getting them imposed the way they need to be. Making sure that presses are available, finishing equipment is available, coordinating with schedulers and planners, coordinating with sales and estimators.
    •  These are the people who have the most responsibility sitting on their shoulders. They have to be able to inspire their teams because, as I said to start, on any given day of the week, something's going to go wrong. They will be asked to be heroes because things happen. Customers change their mind after the print job has already started. Substrate. It turns out the substrate you plan to print on, nobody checked to see to learn that it was damaged when it was delivered. And all of a sudden you don't have the right substrates. A delivery of your consumables is missing. You don't have enough ink or you don't have enough toner.
    • All these things are in their purview to get solved. And they do that not only by working with their team to find ways forward, but also by leveraging their network of printing friends. Very often print operations managers are very friendly with the print operations managers in other printing shops in, in the local area or in the region. If they are lacking some anchor, lacking some toner, or they're missing a cutting blade or some other disaster has befallen the shop, they have people they can go to that might be willing to lend lend the ink, lend the toner, lend the blade. That's all around personality and being able to develop that persona of someone people look to not only inspire them, but to help grease the wheels.
    • These are the people who keep an eye out for interdepartmental rivalries. I know it's shocking, but it does happen. This department and that department, for some reason, don't get along. This is the person who's going to be charged with getting those things resolved and not allowing it to blow up.
    • These are the people who are backstopping the project management plans. Sometimes this person has enough expertise to look at the project plan developed by the planner and the scheduler and say. That's not going to happen that way because this is going to happen and it's going to take longer or you left too much time. We can actually do it faster. When we say they fuss over resources like Scrooge McDuck. 
    • It's because they don't want to be without them. It's not just stuff. It's not just consumables. It's also the staff. These are the people who are watching to see who's doing their job, who's learning, who's not learning, who might need some help and who might be a candidate for moving into a new role, right?
    • They're really the overseers looking at everything. They've got to be equally emotionally available and data aware because they use all of those talents. Very often, you'll find that print operations managers grow up in a print shop. They go through a lot of different jobs before they achieve the print operations manager role, because it takes knowledge of all the work to understand how to really do the job well.
    • [00:05:19] Ryan McAbee: I think two key components to their role, and it goes to that resources and the Gantt chart and the data and the dashboard aspect is that they want to make sure that they have the resources that are needed that you mentioned, that the materials are there, that if they need extra blades or consumables for the equipment, that it's all there. The flip side of that is they really want to make sure that costs are controlled because, you estimated a job to have This amount of labor, this amount of cost that would protect your profitability that you have in the job.
    • But if you need that overruns or you can't achieve that's going to affect how you may lose money on that job in the end. They really are the overseers to make sure that your operations can meet that brief. The other aspect is that they should be highly focused on waste. You don't want to have a waste cause because they, the printing or the finish equipment is not maintained correctly. You don't want to have hickeys on the print out, so to speak, or some other kind of print defect. You don't want to have it get finishing and the operator set, have a setting on the machine, correct so that it eats through half of the print run, and then you have to go back on press to get more quantity.
    •  All of that managing of the jobs as they come through. That's definitely a superpower for the print operations manager. 
    • [00:06:28] Pat McGrew: They set the culture, right? To a very large extent, you find that every print shop you go into has a culture and some of them are laughy fun places, but they're still, they're very accurate.
    • Others are very taciturn and just the facts. But this is the person who's responsible for setting the tone of the shop, how how much coordination is going to happen between departments? How friendly are people? How willing are people to go ask for help when they need it?
    • How willing is someone to say I made a mistake? This person sets the culture that makes everything work. 
    • [00:07:00] Ryan McAbee: That's a very good point. Let's talk about some actual operational level roles that are also have superpowers. The first step in the production chain is typically in the pre press operator realm. 
    • This is an area where it's changed a lot over the years. We went from basically a very artisan based role to it's much more of a technology based role these days, but you still have to know what you're doing. Customers will submit their data and files and you've got to figure out if they gave you everything that you intended to get. That the file structurally is usable or the data is structurally usable. If it's not, you pro you have to figure out either a, are they going to fix it? Or more than likely, how am I going to fix it? With the tool set that I have. So there really are black belt ninjas when it comes to software and all the tools they use from creative design programs to color management, to imposition programs, so that you can lay out the artwork to optimize your material usage when it gets to the printing.
    •  They really should also have kind of that sixth sense understanding of the interplay between color and the paper and lighting conditions and how all that kind of plays together when it's going to be produced in the end. 
    •  In printing, we're really in a 2D format, but a two dimensional format, but they really probably see things more in 3D because at the end of the day, especially now that we're getting into more kind of signage wide format, we're getting the packaging. That's all structural as well. It's not just a flat
    • [00:08:26] Pat McGrew: And embellishment is the other place where you really need to be able to see that way. I think they actually deserve two capes, not just one, because if you think about shops that are producing direct mail, also producing wide format, maybe role fit and flatbed printing of large format or grand format pieces, they might be doing label printing as well.
    • There are general commercial shops that have grown to be able to print on just about every substrate, whether it's a bolt of fabric to vinyl to glass to wood. The prepress operators have to understand how color, how ink, how toner, whatever their methods are, how those colors are going to lay down on those substrates to meet the customer's vision of what they're buying.
    •  It's very special set of skills that gets them there. Imagine the order comes in where we're printing stickers that are going to go on the floor. We're printing banners that are going to go in a trade show booth. We're printing business cards, and we're printing trifold brochures, but that logo better look identical on every one of them.
    • [00:09:29] Pat McGrew: This is the person responsible for understanding color profiling and how ink will lay or anchor toner will lay on the substrate to be able to achieve that color requirement. 
    • [00:09:41] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely true. That's usually the first step in kind of the production floor. Then it usually moves on to people that we would typically say are attached to the equipment in some way, shape or form.
    • They're interacting with pieces, usually not one piece of equipment anymore these days. Usually they're doing several pieces of equipment, especially if it's in the digital printing side. We have printing equipment operators. So how do they bend the laws of physics and what makes them tick?
    • [00:10:06] Pat McGrew: The interesting thing about a modern printing equipment operator, and it's true, whether it's an offset press, a gravure press , or it's one of the many digital presses that are in the market, the operator has a lot of responsibilities for the way the jobs get queued in the way they release the jobs to the presses or to the CTPs to build the plates.
    • They have a lot of responsibilities. In a lot of ways, they're also responsible for making sure that once a job begins, it actually looks the way it's supposed to look. They're the first arbiter of whether this print job is actually going to be acceptable to the customer or not. If you start seeing reds that look more orange, or you start to see that blacks seem to look blue, normally the operator is the first one to raise the red flag and stop the job and say, wait a minute, we've got a problem here.
    •  What I think of in terms of bending the laws of physics is very often they can adjust moisturizers, adjust dryers, and change the way the ink or the toner is behaving on the substrate without having to go to someone else today without actually repairing a file. They do it on the machine by being magicians. It's hard to know if they're bending the law of physics or they're just magicians. I think the jury's out on that one. 
    • These people have to be mechanically minded as well, because usually the operators are also responsible for machine maintenance. The thing that we know is that shops that do not pay attention to machine maintenance wind up with more problems and poor print quality than those that are actually religious about it. 
    • [00:11:41] Ryan McAbee: The other thing that we should have added to the list here was x ray vision. So much of an operator's responsibility, or should be, is a checklist for quality control. As things are coming off the piece of equipment, in this case, a printer of some sort. What does the print quality look like? What does the color quality look like? How is the ink actually, is the ink actually sitting on the substrate how we expected it to, or is something changed to where we now have to let it dry before it goes into a finishing process. These are all things that the printing operator is going to be doing. 
    • It's like second nature. You don't see them doing this in many cases, but they're doing it, right? It's definitely this. mechanical mindset that they need because it is a physical piece of equipment that you have to nurture.
    • You have to get it to do things. Sometimes it doesn't naturally want it to do. 
    • [00:12:28] Pat McGrew: They have eyes in the back of their head too. I'm convinced of it. 
    • [00:12:32] Ryan McAbee: They have to these days because, like we mentioned, if it's a digital printing environment they're probably tending to two, three pieces of equipment.
    • [00:12:40] Pat McGrew: Press equipment and finishing equipment. If you look at a typical book line it's not one long line. It's looping back on itself in order to get the books produced. They have to be aware of all the modules that are there in addition to the printing that's going on.
    • If they have presses that are attached in line to finishing, they have to be the master of that entire line from roll into or pallette in to finish product out. It's a big job. Very often these people don't get lots of training when they first get assigned to the job. The people who are successful in these roles are the people who are mechanically minded. They're kinetically focused. They understand the requirement of print quality. It's in their DNA for whatever reason, and they just embrace it. 
    • Some of the fun things that are happening in this space, are More and more of the equipment vendors are providing virtual reality help for the maintenance on the machines. We're seeing more use of the virtual reality headsets. You're seeing into the machine but sometimes attached to a support person who can see what through the glasses so that they can help you make the best maintenance decisions or to diagnose a problem or to identify something that you can do to make the print quality better. That means that these people not only have to be mechanically minded, they need to be gamers too. I think that some of the best operators I know are gamers.
    • [00:14:08] Ryan McAbee: You're right. The equipment manufacturers have really computerized and digitized everything. You've got to understand software and how to interact with the equipment in that way. That goes to your training aspect. You really do need to make sure that the equipment operators get proper training on the interfaces, the software component of that mechanical device, because that's where a lot of the automation and efficiencies really are going to be.
    • And speaking of that, we have after it gets printed... 
    • [00:14:35] Pat McGrew: Everything that we just said. Yeah, everything we just said applies to this person too. In some shops, it's the same operator doing both jobs. In some shops, there are actually finishing equipment operators and press operators. They need the same skill sets, but we often find that finishing equipment lags behind printing equipment in terms of being installed. The newest version being installed in shops. Finishing equipment has a history of long amortization tables and long life, right? I've walked into shops with 30 and 40 year old finishing equipment that's still running every day and everybody's happy.
    • Those finishing operators that don't have the advantage of automated consoles that are telling them if a blades out of alignment, they have to be able to determine that. They need the ability to understand what to do to adjust things to get things back the way they need to be. I think of finishing operators as having their hands in the machines a lot more than maybe the press operators.
    • So the press operators, it's usually when it's maintenance time, but finishing it's set up for every job. And on the older equipment where that's not done automatically, or it's not reading a JDF file for the setup information. That finishing operator has to be able to read the specification and know what to do to that finishing device to make sure that the right stuff is being done. The cuts are in the right place. The folds and creases are in the right places and die cuts are in the right places.
    • [00:15:57] Ryan McAbee: I 100 percent agree that we see more mechanically driven things at this point in finishing because of that long life of the equipment. The other thing is that they need to be more critical of a quality control aspect because they're really the last mile, so to speak, in production before it gets boxed or palletized and shipped. If they don't catch something. It's going to end up as a defect and it may turn around and be kicked back by the customer. 
    • At this point in the production cycle, they're creating the finished product. It's going even more so from that 2D kind of flat sheet or material to some finished product in the end, whether that's a book, whether that's a flyer, poster whatever the thing is. They probably have an even more critical role in some aspects than for the operation than even the printing operators. 
    • Last but not least in the production area, we have warehouse operators. They're shipping technicians. There's a lot of different names that these folks can go by, but they're really responsible at the end of the day to know. That product exists either in a warehouse shelf or it's coming off of the production line. They have to always have a running list in their head of not only the time, but they have to coordinate with the cutoff times of the shippers that they may be contracting with whether that's UPS, Fedex, whoever it is. They might even courier the products themselves going locally or the town over. They have this constantly running clock along with their work in progress list where they know things are coming in and then they really are the ones that figure out how to optimize the shipping cost based on the timing that the customer needs. Does it have to go to a priority? 
    • [00:17:32] Pat McGrew: Or the mail drop that you're trying to hit.
    • [00:17:33] Ryan McAbee: Or the mail drop you're trying to hit if you're a mailer. Any other superpowers stand out for this group that's at the end of the process here? 
    • [00:17:39] Pat McGrew: More and more, again, I put the gamer aspect into this. The reason I say that is because it's not just that GUIs on software are getting friendlier. The other thing that's happening in warehouses is that we're watching more robotics enter the table, right? 
    • What's happened over the last 15 years that I've been, Looking and really paying attention to it is I'm seeing more and more warehouse robots, and they do a lot of different jobs. They might be co bots that are helping to pack boxes and position them on pallets. They might be material transport robots that are actually going to a shelf, reading a barcode, grabbing what they need, setting it on their They're transport and then moving it to the end of a press. There's a lot of that going on too.
    • And warehouse operators who are working in a robotically enabled environment, whether it's just cobot, robot arms for packing or mail tray building, or actually moving pallets around. They need another set of skills to be able to work with that program software that drives those robots and co bots and it's a gamer skill.
    • It's the ability to know how this thing is going to move and how it's, some of the robots require lines painted on the floor for them to travel. But more and more, we're seeing GPS enabled robots that are able to move around freely and they have to be smart enough to know where people are. It's no fair tripping over people. And it's no fair running into machines and it's no fair dropping things, right? Those things aren't acceptable. The warehouse operator has to be aware of what resources they have in that respect too, and make sure that they're working as efficiently as possible to deliver the right things to the right place at the right time.
    • [00:19:26] Ryan McAbee: Even if you haven't gotten to the robotics, there's still more technology that's crept into this area because if you're doing any kind of inventory management, you're probably using barcode with either a tablet or other kind of scanner so that you can tag in, tag out things. Even when you receive materials, all that kind of activities happening as well.
    • There's also software that will help you optimize the shipping across those carriers that we mentioned before. So that's another kind of interaction point where gamer type personality would find it easier to learn those types of solutions as well. 
    • Across the board, there's a lot of superhero and heroic efforts that go into production on a daily basis.
    • And we hope this gave you a little bit of guidance on maybe where you can fit in a printing world. If you're not an employee and inside of a print shop now. Or maybe understand a little bit about what your coworker does before you get it, or after it moves on from where you're at and just a good general education here on everything that happens in the print shop.
    • We hope that you join us for a future episode here at the print university. And until then, don't 
    • [00:20:26] Pat McGrew: forget to wash your cape.

77- WHAT IS A TRADE PRINTER?

We define what a trade printer is and how the landscape continues to evolve. Learn how trade printers operate in order to support other print companies.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, it's Pat McGrew with McGrew Group and my best friend, Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot consulting and we're here to bring you another episode of The Print University. This time, it is a really important topic because it's an opportunity. It's called inside a trade printer, and this is part of our production printing group of modules.
    •  Ryan, one of the things about the world of trade printing is that it sits under the surface. There are a lot of printers who don't actually know what a trade printer is, let alone, buyers and others. A trade printer is a really specific kind of entity. It sits in a totally different world.
    • Because as a rule, a trade printer does not interact with direct consumers. They interact with professional buyers like print brokers and agencies and large industrial type print buyers. What really is a trade printer. 
    • [00:00:54] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, let's go ahead and define that.
    • So you're right, Pat. It's a print operation that markets and generates most of its revenue by producing work for other printing companies. That means that they're, like you said, not dealing directly with the end customer or print buyer that's actually wanting the print produced. They're working with the intermediary , and in many cases, another printing company.
    •  That's why we say their business model is typically business to business. But it could also be, and we're seeing this a little bit more where it's business to to business to consumer, because there's this end consumer that says, I want something printed and it, but it's going through an online intermediary that gets fulfilled on the back end by a printer that's acting in that capacity as a trade printer.
    • These kind of trade printing outfits, really do come in all shapes and sizes though. We see, the classic example, and I'm thinking particularly from the commercial printing that the bindery area or finishing was definitely an area where you'd find like a niche kind of trade printer. A perfect example is sewn books That was a more specialized a piece of equipment typically in the past and that would be a printer might say yes, " I can print your book", but i'm going to actually outsource the finishing to a trade bindery who's going to actually sew that book up and make it a finished piece. Also same thing with perfect binding.
    •  When you got into those more unique finishing kind of aspects, the printer may not have had that equipment and they would outsource that work. But there's other kind of examples too. I'm thinking now we're getting to much more of an era of embellishment and that we're seeing that not everybody has a Scodix, MGI, that kind of device laying around on the digital side, or may not even have the analog versions of those kind of things to gold foil stamping and any other kind of technique. Where else have you seen trade printing kind of focus ? 
    • [00:02:35] Pat McGrew: I think the one that you just brought up is the 1 that sort of always leaps out to me is if you think about people who do foil stamping and sometimes specialized varnishes and textures and things, those are always associated with trade finishers- people who work with, maybe hundreds, if not thousands of different printing companies. They have a very specialized niche that they fulfill and the funny thing is that a trade printer can be full service, right? We're seeing more and more equipment every kind of equipment, but more and more we're seeing companies who position themselves as trade printers, really just living inside of a network of other trade printers. It might be that I've got some specialized finishing that I have. So maybe I do foil stamping, or maybe I do certain kind of embellishment. Maybe I'm now getting into digital embellishment and I've made the investment in this digital embellishment machine and the best way for me to make money with it is to open my embellishment line to a whole lot of other people. That makes it interesting because then you have commercial printers who have a trade printing division. There's a part of it they're operating for profit direct to their direct buyers and another piece of the business is operating for the benefit of other printers. That's another revenue stream for them. 
    • I think that it's not just embellishment and things like bindery, but also the other kinds of finishing that you might need. Things like making folders and folding carton and a lot of other things that can be printed now pretty easily on most modern devices, whether you're an analog or you're a digital shop. You may not have the finishing that allows you to sell folding carton or allows you to sell specialized folder making.
    •  There's a lot of it that's out there. There's a lot of opportunity that it brings into a printing environment. 
    • [00:04:28] Ryan McAbee: The other use case that we should mention is the fact that sometimes trade printers are used just because you are over capacity and you need to outsource work that you could do in house, but it's either because of a date issue where you need to deliver it, or maybe you're just too much, you have too much work in at any given time you can just outsource the complete job to third party printers.
    • So that kind of thing happens. 
    • [00:04:49] Pat McGrew: We know a number of trade printers who actually say that's a significant part of their revenue. They handle seasonal highs and lows for a network of printers that they work with that. That's a really common thing. And as you mentioned that, web to print of online printer mentality that really grew in the print industry, an awful lot of that work is fulfilled by trade printers because it allows the online printer to accept any kind of work.
    • [00:05:14] Ryan McAbee: That's right. That's really why we say they're customers from a trade printer's perspective or other printing companies by and large. Then we have these online printers and technology platforms that have grown up in the past couple decades and continue to evolve with business models and how they engage with the consumer or the person that's wanting to print and also engage with the printers on the back end.
    • I think you made a good point of that when you said, you could be a commercial printer, but you have a segment or portion of your revenue that's now coming from one of these technology platform form type companies. That's what we see here. We have the traditional model of trade printing, but then there's these platforms that are more B2C to B or B two, B2C is what that really should say. That have grown up. So how do we differentiate these two groups? 
    • [00:05:58] Pat McGrew: So I think the thing to start with is the traditional B2B trade printer. And if you think about how these organizations grew up. These were the people that other printers went to get specialty work done. Those relationships were phone calls. And then later on, they were email relationships. And you typically worked with trade printers in your region, maybe not necessarily in your city, but definitely in your region. Over time, they would become bigger and bigger and a lot of the trade printers started building or acquiring plants in other regions in order to become maybe national trade printers. There are quite a few of those out there.
    • Same with bindery specialists, as they gained reputation, as we started doing more of our buying through online channels and even the early days of Web2Print, trade printers really were right along on the road to that, right?
    • They were part of the evolution of Web2Print in a lot of ways because they already knew how to handle orders from a lot of different places and they had the internal workflows built for it. As we started to see the rise of Web2Print. There were a lot of companies that started to figure out that if you could own the platform, if you could own the means of gathering the orders together, there was an opportunity to grow something really large. 
    • I think everybody knows the name VistaPrint. If you think about how this to print changed the nature of buying, it really did because that five dollars for however many 100 business card model and advertising on television changed the nature of how a lot of procurement organizations started thinking about buying print.
    • What it really did was benefit everybody because it made them more interested in finding platforms that would help them buy print more more intelligently, more seamlessly, and also ensuring that they were getting the best delivery timeframes for the print that they needed.
    • You saw the rise of online printers and a company like Cimpress, which is the parent of Vistaprint, flyer alarm out of Germany, happy printing. They are only a few of a lot of online printers. And today you might go to Printful you might go to Printable, you might go to any number of companies that are online printers.
    • In fact, you may be an online printer that's serving a direct to consumer audience or a business to business audience, but where your businesses are really your customers. Your next step might be to become part of the trade printer network where you could take advantage of taking orders from anywhere.
    • If you have niche kinds of printing or finishing that you do Ryan technology platforms are a different thing. Aren't they? 
    • [00:08:51] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, they are and there's even an outlier amongst the ones we have listed here. Basically they're aggregating the demand side or all the buyers and the work coming in. Then they have partnered with a network usually in the hundreds, if not more printers usually geographically spread across the globe that they can push that digital file from the customer to any one of those around the globe to have the production closest to the source of where that print is physically needed.
    •  There's a kind of an ecological story there in terms of, it's greener for the planet from a carbon footprint and also just speed of delivery of getting it to where it's needed the fastest, which is another value proposition. Being able to work with one company, if you have global print needs where you're needing print in, in Ireland and you're needing print in the U S and you're needing print in Singapore and so on and so forth.
    • So that's really the difference there. Go ahead and rewind in a couple of points here. When you came to online printers and we were talking, you're talking about Vistaprint, I think the other thing that's worth mentioning there is that it changed the customer experience, right? 
    • [00:09:57] Pat McGrew: It definitely did.
    • [00:09:58] Ryan McAbee: Because prior to the online printers, if you needed print was you're having to call up or email your local printer that you knew of and really procure that print. Then it changed to where it was more self service where I don't necessarily need to have a relationship or have to go through the manual steps of ordering print. I can just do so a few clicks online and upload my artwork that I may have from, gotten from the designer and that way it just changed how we order print and the expectation for how we order print. 
    • [00:10:25] Pat McGrew: I think another thing worth mentioning under online printers is that for anyone who is part of a franchise network, which we know some of our audience are.
    • You effectively become an online printer when you become a franchise printer because they all have their own online web to print solution sets that become part of that franchise network. In some ways, everyone in that network. Is capable of taking on work from other franchisees who might have different equipment.
    • That's how most of the franchise models are built these days. So that there's value in the franchise network, being able to reach out and touch someone else's bindery capabilities or finishing or cutting or die cutting or embellishment or whatever they might need. Whichever one of the major franchise networks you're part of that web to print environment that becomes part of your website makes you an online printer as well.
    • [00:11:18] Ryan McAbee: Last thing to differentiate here is there is the physicality of stuff. So on the platform side, you're really pushing a digital file anywhere around the globe that you need to push it. When we got back to that previous example of a trade bindery that's a different kind of animal, right? Because you have to ship the printed sheets to that bindery. It's not economical to ship printed sheets from the UK to the US to have it bound. That still has a much more local presence and need where you work with your local geographic area.
    • [00:11:50] Pat McGrew: The same is true for embellishment. If you're doing post printing embellishment, it's some of the same challenge. You need to be able to get it to the place it needs to get to. You're saying sheets, it could be rolls that are being sent. You need to carefully consider where you're going to send something to make sure that it can arrive in good order and get turned around and get delivered back to you, which is normally how these things work.
    • [00:12:15] Ryan McAbee: I think you probably realize at this point that trade printers can print just about anything and everything that they want to print based upon how they're set up as a company and what equipment mix they have. Anything else to elaborate on here? Is there any kind of trends that you think we're seeing amongst the trade print community?
    • [00:12:31] Pat McGrew: I think that we're starting to see them go into more packaging. One of the things we've always thought of them for business collateral. That's like the most common thing. Most of the major restaurant chains work with trade printers because that allows them to send their nationwide menus to a single location and then they get printed in the regions where the restaurant chains do business. An awful lot of businesses. Big box stores do the same thing where they have a central relationship with a trade printer that then make sure that signs get delivered the way they need to get delivered. Tags, shelf tags, store pull up signs, banners, things like that. 
    •  We're used to trade printers in publishing, especially for small to medium sized publishers who don't have their own means of production. Very often those are our trade printer relationships that they leverage. Marketing, certainly, and promotional shirts my, my McGrew Group shirt, all of those things can also come through.
    • But packaging is the one I think we're going to keep an eye. From folding carton to flexible pouches to small corrugated subscription boxes, I think these are a big opportunity for a lot of printers and the trade printers are certainly starting to get on board with those. We've already started to see them do it.
    • [00:13:47] Ryan McAbee: The online printers are forcing that part of the equation to where you were seeing web to pack as a name for it. 
    • Capabilities and equipment mix. Again, I think it follows the same as what we were just saying about the applications, right? They can have any and all technology in house, probably where they're adding some more capabilities would be with that packaging element. The other one is probably in the wide format arena too, where there's just a lot of variation in terms of the things that you can print with those devices.
    • [00:14:13] Pat McGrew: Some of the announcements we've seen this year in the wide format space have been pretty interesting. They have been creating devices that are more versatile that take a wider range of substrates. I think the number of colors is still pretty standard across most of the wide format pieces, but as we look at the kinds of substrates. We've seen a lot more textile printing devices come to market as well.
    • The new FOREARTH from Kyocera, is one that I've been taking a look at and that's certainly getting an interesting reception .HP has as a device as well. The folks from EFI have their textile printers from Reggiani I think that wide format is going to, it's going to be a category we're going to need to find new definitions for, and I think new words to describe because It's almost a disservice to say wide format. Because there are so many variations. You could be printing car wraps and building wraps and bus wraps, or you could be printing building size posters. You could be printing home decor, right? You could be wallpaper. You could be printing art pieces. Yeah. Or you could be printing business cards on your wide format printer, which I have also seen done. At the end of the day, I think that that is an area that is, it's not set to explode. It's already exploding and expanding. I think we see that every time we go to a major print show it's almost hard to find a print show that doesn't have a really good outpost of new and interesting wide format equipment. 
    • [00:15:43] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, that's very true. It is definitely a couple of spaces to watch. To wrap it up here, we have some challenges and opportunities that a trade printer would face.
    •  To me, the biggest challenge is that they don't own the customer relationship. They're always working on behalf of another business entity. That can be a little interesting, they typically don't have direct lines of communication with that customer. If there's some kind of delay or challenge in production, they have to go through the third, the intermediaries, you step there with the company to get back to the customer and so forth. But that also creates the challenge with, they don't really control the price that was given to the customer either and the profitability of margins that would have been in that mix as well, right?
    • [00:16:25] Pat McGrew: It's a delicate balance when you work in that trade printer, if you are the trade printer you fight the challenge of making your pricing appropriate to your profit requirements and your margin requirements, but also tenable to someone who's now going to have to mark it up when they hand a price to their customers.
    • You are also in a world today where you are going to want your online systems to be very accessible to the people you serve as a trade printer so that they can do their estimating and quoting as seamlessly as possible without having to call you every time they want to bid a job? In the old days ,"Oh, you, you need this work, Mr. Customer. I'll get back to you shortly." then your next phone call was to your trade printer who could handle that specialized kind of work. You negotiate with them for the best price. Then you figure out your price. Then you can build your quote for your customer. It was a long process to get there.
    • The turn of business today is so fast that it's rare to find that still being the methodology. I think it does happen in some places and in some relationships. But today, the ideal is that I, as the printer who wants to buy from the trade printer, wants an automatic connection. I, as the trade printer want my systems to be automatically able to provide pricing to my network so that I don't have to have people on the phone, sitting, doing rough calculations and hoping they get it right.
    • You want it all to be as automated as possible in your workflow and those relationships and connectivities to be as automated as possible as well. 
    • [00:18:06] Ryan McAbee: I 100 percent agree. That's the value and the change in how you acquire the business is that you don't have all those costs associated with doing the sales and basically managing the customer account. You're just getting the work through a connection and that, that's what makes the pricing dynamics a little different than if in a normal sense. 
    • [00:18:23] Pat McGrew: But you're still, I wanna use the word hostage to seasonal work, right? One of the things that, that we mentioned here on the slide is that volumes might from partners might be inconsistent, and that is absolutely true, right? Whether it's coming into Christmas or Halloween or Easter or tax season or different sports seasons that can also drive the kinds of buying that's going on in, in a trade print environment. You as the trade printer need to be watching all the different seasons that you're supporting and understanding your capacities and your volumes.
    •  As you start to think about the changing nature of things in the marketplace, you need to be keeping a close eye on changing trends so that you will be able to continue to offer the products that your buyers want to buy. You have some of the same challenges that any commercial printer has.
    • [00:19:14] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, absolutely. We talked previously about the online printers and the technology platforms and you can absolutely if you're a print operation, go to their websites to figure out how to join those networks. The other thing that's important to know, if you're a smaller to midsize kind of shop, there's also a pretty unique piece of software out there to call P3 that helps smaller entities do this outsourcing. So just wanted to make a mention of that because it is out in the marketplace. 
    • [00:19:43] Pat McGrew: I would certainly talk to the print vendors that you work with about the relationships that they have with trade entities. They all have them. They all know who all the trade printers who are, looking for work. Sometimes it's a bi directional relationship because you may have a specialty that a trade printer could use. Maybe you're the first one in your region to buy the hot new embellishment machine, and the trade printer hasn't yet made that investment, but they'd like to be able to sell that capability to the rest of their network.
    • Sometimes that's another way to enter into a trade printer relationship as not only a buyer, but a provider. 
    • [00:20:22] Ryan McAbee: Very good. To wrap it up here, if you don't know who your trade partners are, go ask. You probably have some and that will help you understand how they fit into, to the world of your particular print operation there.
    • And with that said, thank you for joining this episode of Print University. We hope to see you next time.

78 - WHAT A PRINT BUYER SHOULD KNOW

What is the role and skillset needed for print buyers today? We also discuss how print service providers can work and educate print buyers to build a beneficial relationship.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode here at the Print University. Today, Pat, we are going to be talking about Print Buyers and what in the world is a Print Buyer? 
    • [00:00:13] Pat McGrew: Oh gosh, print buyers are fun people. You know how in a lot of jobs, there's a diversity of how you might define it. These are typically the people who are charged with translating a brand's need into a print specification to and find the printer to actually execute the work. Again, there are a lot of flavors of print buyers. There are people who are print brokers who basically work with a whole lot of different people and find printers to execute their work. There are people who are print buyers within an agency, a marketing agency, or a brand agency, or an advertising agency, and their job is to take whatever the campaigns need and translate it into print specifications and find the printers to execute on them and then stay with that work until it actually gets executed.
    •  Then there are just people within implants and people within companies that aren't actually agencies. Maybe they work for a manufacturing company, they work for a government, they work for a school who have the role of buying print. They all execute their jobs a little bit differently, but effectively they act as the sort of Star Trek universal translator between the person with the need for print and the printer who is going to try and execute on the specification.
    • [00:01:36] Ryan McAbee: If you take it down to the smallest level, there's just small business owners that need to have print done that would be buying print on behalf of whatever their entity or their company is. 
    • [00:01:47] Pat McGrew: And everything that we talk about in this session is going to be relevant to them as well. Because the rules are going to apply. Trying to buy print it requires attention to detail, precision. It also requires an understanding of the capabilities of the people you're asking to execute on it. And let's face it, buying book printing is a little different from buying label printing or banner printing or direct mail printing or poster printing or packaging printing or promotional printing, right? They all have their unique need for certain kinds of precision, certain kinds of specifications. When we talk about print buying, we're talking about it as a business process.
    • It's necessary to understand. All the constituents in the supply chain from the people you're doing the work for to the people you're buying it from and understanding what's possible and what's not because the other kind of secret role of a print buyer is to explain what really can't be done to the constituent that they're trying to help, whether because of cost and guidelines that the print buyers working within in terms of pricing and cost models. In terms of time to execute. "Yes, that would be a lovely piece, ma'am, but it's going to take 8 weeks to get it. And your campaign launches next week. Those kinds of conversations so you have to be a diplomat when you're in the print buying business, but also working with the printing company as we're trying to get the print done, but also getting it finished. Because often there are complexities involved in that. The print buying has some basic guidelines that we play by. 
    • They may be any of these people we just described. They're going to have to be somebody who can work well with others. They need to be a team player. It is essential that they can work well with everybody in the supply chain. They also, as I said, need to be a diplomat because most print buyers don't work with 1 printing company. They usually have a corral of printing companies that they work with, maybe because of different capabilities, different turnaround time, different equipment capabilities in terms of, what kind of printing they can do, what kind of finishing they can do. And sometimes just because it's safer, and it's always safer to have multiple companies that you can go to get a bid from to see who can do the work in the time frame you need and at the cost you need.
    • [00:04:23] Ryan McAbee: Sometimes there's corporate policies at the parent company that stipulate, we are looking for eco friendly type of printer, or we're looking for sustainable materials that are used, or maybe we're looking to outsource to us a minority owned business. So you have all these kind of stipulations that might be in play in the background too.
    • [00:04:39] Pat McGrew: And then sometimes print buyers score, right? They actually, they score who they can buy from. And , that diversity piece. Whether it's my own business, whether it's a economically challenged zone area, there are all sorts of ways that print buyers can score. Especially for larger companies, that's a requirement of their buying patterns, right? They want to be able to demonstrate that they're supporting their community. And that becomes part of the process as well. 
    • [00:05:05] Ryan McAbee: And I guess to give a visual for people let's take the Tiffany, the jewelry company and that's a kind of iconic example. I think everybody can think of. And so there's someone that sits in that company that facilitates the boxes, packaging for ring boxes and so forth and the bags that you carry out of the store. It's a very specific blue that is their brand color. 
    • [00:05:26] Pat McGrew: Tiffany blue. Yeah. 
    • [00:05:28] Ryan McAbee: So that print buyer as an example is going to be very particular about the color output and making sure that blue is Tiffany blue as an example.
    • [00:05:37] Pat McGrew: And the substrates right? Because the substrates have to have that Tiffany feel and that Tiffany look to them. Most bigger brands, especially the luxury brands that they have very strict guidelines. That means that all the printing companies and finishing companies that work with them have to be able to understand and execute on those guidelines.
    • But it comes back to the print buyer to make sure that it's been executed on correctly. 
    • [00:06:01] Ryan McAbee: A lot of times that happens with, and I think we're slowly even for luxury brands we're slowly moving away from that paradigm, but traditionally that's always been happening at a physical press check. So that print buyer physically goes to the printing company and they see the output coming off the end of the printer or the press. Take that print sample to a light booth. They look at it and they see it give the thumbs up or the thumbs down and basically work with the printer, the operator of the press to get it into whatever they perceive as the quality and the color output that they're looking for.
    • Right? 
    • [00:06:33] Pat McGrew: Yeah, absolutely. It's a big job and it's a gatekeeper job, it's because if the print doesn't look good, the print buyer tends to get blamed for picking that particular printer, right? That's right. So you've got to be a diplomat, you've got to be the gatekeeper. 
    • [00:06:51] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of a diplomat and gatekeeper, the the thing that you alluded to before is that there's a set of soft skills that are really needed because the primary function of a print buyer is to, to source at the best cost possible, best price possible, and also the correct printed materials that the company needs, but you're also having to be that interpreter in many cases of the technical aspects of printing and its capabilities to say what is possible, what's not possible within a set of defined, restrictions or parameters. In many cases, this, the quote unquote, bad guy, when you walk into the printer themselves if it's not up to par or to expectations of what was ordered.
    • [00:07:31] Pat McGrew: It's absolutely true. And we can't emphasize enough that very rarely is print buying a nine to five job. It is a kind of job that can go late ,start early, run over weekends because of that interface point with the printing company. Especially if you're working on a high profile job, that has a short turnaround time, the print buyer is on call for all of that.
    •  There's a work ethic component to the print buying business. I mentioned a teamwork is essential because there's no lone wolves in print buyer world because there can't be. There are too many moving parts and components. You've got to know a lot about the printing companies you work with are capable of. You need to be diplomatic enough to be able to go back to your constituent to say, "I know you asked for this and I know this is important to you, but on the time constraints or the budget constraints that you've given me to work with, here are a few other choices, right?" And so you need to be able to do that in a way that everybody will find acceptable. Being a problem solver, very important and that can be a lot of different things that can be having to work through. With the printing company around the logistics transfer, right?
    • It's not just getting the printing done, but getting it delivered to where it needs to go. If you are working with brands on a big sign project, and that store signage needs to be delivered to 120 stores across a vast array of cities and towns. There's problem solvings in terms solving, in terms of logistics. There you may also be interfacing with the people who are going to do the sign installations. The print buyer ends up often having to get involved in all of that, especially in smaller companies or in direct agencies. It's a big job.
    • [00:09:21] Ryan McAbee: I want to flip this around a little bit and get your perspective. I'm a print shop and I know I have to work with many different types of print buyers. What we often hear today, much like what we're facing internally in the industry, that there's been change over in terms of the print buyers. There's a different generational type change over and maybe the skill sets haven't trans translated or are going from the previous generation to the new generation. So they're a little less experienced in understanding print and its fundamentals. If I'm a printer that's facing that type of situation where I probably am going to have to educate my print buyer to a large extent, what key things do you think are important to make sure they understand? Is it paper? Is it about the printing technology? Is it about just how to spec out the job? What's important? 
    • [00:10:10] Pat McGrew: I think the spec part of it is probably the most important . If you cannot properly spec the job, finished size, type of binding, type of finishing, type of, hanging book binding, do you need it sewn? Do you need perfect bound? If you can't spec the job correctly, everything else is going to be a riskier challenge for the printer. As a printing company, I want you as the print buyer to understand what I expect to see in a spec right, in the specified job.
    • Very often that can be a design guide. It can be a guide to all the different capabilities we have. Sometimes it's a web to print site where all of those specifications have been codified and validated and the print buyer is encouraged, if not required to place their print order, even if it's a request for a quote through an online portal. All of that specification is known to be accurate at that point, because it won't let you put in something that can't be accomplished by the equipment that the printer has on the floor. 
    • [00:11:19] Ryan McAbee: I like to think of bowling where you've got those things that go in the gutters for kids, it's the bumper guards. When you throw that bowling ball, it's going to eventually get to the striking lane. It's the same kind of thing we're talking about where Web2Print is putting those bumper guards to make sure that they can get to the, down the path that you want them to go, right? 
    • [00:11:36] Pat McGrew: It's why a lot of printers have adopted that kind of technology. We thought of Web2Print initially as maybe being more consumer facing, so I could buy the custom card. The value of having an online portal that validates every piece of the specification before it ever goes is worth its weight in platinum. That is one of those things that I think is the most important thing you can do.
    • The other thing you can do is document your capabilities. We like to think that print buyers are knowledgeable and understand all the print technologies. I promise you most of them don't. Very often. They've been assigned the role as a point on their path through a company rotation. They don't actually know a lot about the technologies. If you can put together a brief guide to what you can do, not the machine specifications, but, "hey, we can print these size things. We can do this kind of color. We can do this kind of finishing. We can print on these kinds of stocks. We can do these kinds of folding carton. We can do these kinds of labels." If you can provide some basic guidelines, it really is useful. 
    • If you do those two things, the rest of these things will take care of themselves during your tenure as a print buyer. 
    • [00:12:48] Ryan McAbee: Some of those toolkits that are classic examples to help a print buyer understand things are the print samples that you're referring to, and those can be like sales pitch books, that you may have created in the past that highlight your capabilities.
    • The other ones that I think are really useful in this case, and you can probably get them from your paper vendor, I always like to see the ones that have the same thing printed, but just on different substrates or different paper stocks. It will show how that behaves just based on the substrate choice. That's the kind of very visual thing that a print buyer can understand. 
    • [00:13:18] Pat McGrew: Absolutely.
    • [00:13:19] Ryan McAbee: So going forward, who as a print buyer, who can you buy from? Because there's obviously thousands of printers out there in the world. Why should I look for one versus the other?
    • [00:13:28] Pat McGrew: One, you can buy from everybody and in the modern world, today, as we're sitting here you can buy from an online provider, you could buy through Cloud Printer, Gelato Connect, Gelato Direct Cimpress, Vistaprint, or you can go to local printers that you have a relationship with.
    • There's really not a reason to look at these as two different kinds of capabilities. The thing is to work how you're comfortable. If you have an existing relationship with a set of commercial printers. Gosh, use them. I think there's every reason to. If you are looking for something new and different, it's worth exploring the platforms because they've got access to all sorts of technologies that you, your local printer might not have access to.
    • You might think that, I need to do B1 posters and I want them to be embellished. Okay. You may not have a local company that's got a Landa and a Scodex SHD, and that's what you would need. But if that's what you really want, probably somebody, someone on one of these networks has that capability for you.
    • [00:14:35] Ryan McAbee: In all reality, you're probably going to take a layered approach, right? If you are working as a print buyer in that brand that has very specific needs, you're, you probably already have established one or multiple printers that can accommodate that for a unique application.
    •  Then you probably want to layer that with maybe an online printer that can do quick turnaround and get it distributed across the country because they have a print facility that's in California and you're based in New York as an example. Different use cases is why you need to have relationships with multiple printers for if you're a print buyer.
    • [00:15:05] Pat McGrew: Even across the networks, not all networks are configured exactly the same way. You might find capabilities through, Gelato Connect, or Cimpress that are different from those that you find through the growing Canva's network or the growing cloud from the network. So it's always worth thinking about what it is you're trying to accomplish and how you're going to be able to accomplish that most effectively. Some firm buyers that I know they routinely talk to their usual suspects, but they always go out and they look across the networks to see if somebody's got something cool that they should be thinking about.
    • [00:15:35] Ryan McAbee: They'll do that not only for capabilities, but they'll also do it to price check, right? Cause they're getting a reasonable market price and not not something that's out of whack. What can they buy? I think the word on the right says it all. It's anything and everything that you can put that can be printed.
    •  Typically it's gonna be whatever. Company needs, right? You've got all the business collateral stuff that we can think of, which is the very run of the mill business cards, letterhead, that sort of stuff, but then you have things that your marketing department will bring to you that they need, whether it's like a every door direct mail kind of campaign with postcards, or if it's something , more bespoke and variable data driven. It's anything and everything, right?
    • [00:16:14] Pat McGrew: You need a custom printed tent for your next event, there is a printer who will do that for you. You need a custom printed mugs, cups, tchotchkes lanyards. There are people who will print those things for you. You need pitch books for your business. You need catalogs for your manufacturing company. There are people who will print all of these things for you. 
    • Anything that you can imagine, can be printed. Imagine, you go into a food store and look at all the, shelf tags, the labels on cans, printed bottles, printed boxes all of that stuff gets printed and someone is buying that print. There is a print buyer behind everything in every story you go to go into.
    • [00:16:55] Ryan McAbee: Very good points. So twofold here. If I'm getting started as a new print buyer, what do I need to know? And the same thing would apply even if I'm a printer who's having to work with someone who's new in a print buying role. What do we need to make sure that everybody understands? 
    • [00:17:12] Pat McGrew: I think that at the baseline for a print buyer coming into an organization is that they have to understand first what their organization buys, right?
    • What are the things you're going to be asked to source? Are, is it just going to be flat paper because it's marketing brochures? Or are you going to be asked to do the whole promo thing where it's t shirts and caps and tents and posters? Or are you with an organization that's buying packaging? Are you buying books, right? Book printing. Understand all the things that you might be asked to buy. 
    • Spend some time in The Print University. Looking at a lot of our other episodes where we talk about the different kinds of presses that are out there. Whether they're offset, they're gravure, they're analog, they're flexo. Just find out what's out there. Understand the difference between wide format printing and production printing. Understand the difference between how labels are printed and signs are printed. The more you educate yourself, the better off it's going to be. 
    • And if you're going to be buying things that are color sensitive, find some information on color. Understand how to specify color. Understand if you're going to be working in the world of Pantone, where you need to understand the Pantone directories. 
    • Look at one of the recommendations here is to look at invoices of previous work that's been bought. Certainly take some time to understand what your company has previously bought and who they bought from. If you had the opportunity to go spend some time in some of those print shops that they've bought from, that is worth its weight and gold. Seeing it in person makes it real. You can not only understand, yeah, understand the, what they produce, ask to see their print samples, ask to see their print shop, because it'll help you understand why it takes the time it takes to execute on the print work that you need done and why sometimes, 24 hour turnaround is not a possibility.
    • [00:19:08] Ryan McAbee: The project management aspect too is critical because you've got a timing that you've got to figure out. There's lead times, especially if you need high quantity counts, there's a certain lead time that certain products will require. Packaging, usually being more of the realm that requires those lead times. That corresponds to either a promotion that your company is going to do at a certain date or that you're trying to hit a manufacturing line where they're putting that product into that packaging. So definitely the project management aspect is critical to a print by role in many ways to. 
    • [00:19:40] Pat McGrew: Think about needing to buy across multiple countries and have things delivered that look identical. Meet your brand guidelines. Project management becomes a keen part of that as well. 
    • [00:19:53] Ryan McAbee: Hopefully if you're in a multinational global type situation, it's a team of print buyers. Yeah. But so you can leverage that aspect to play to your strings.
    •  This has been great, Pat, thank you for sharing all the insights here about print buyers. I know you talk with many of them in your travels. Any final parting thoughts in terms of print buyers? 
    • [00:20:13] Pat McGrew: For anyone who's going to take on the role of print buyer, think big, think different, think outside of the box, listen to everything that is offered to you, talk to your printers, talk to your constituents, try to help them see new ways of doing things that might be more cost effective, might give you better options in terms of turnaround time and cost.
    • [00:20:37] Ryan McAbee: That's a perfect place to end this episode. Thanks for joining us. And we hope that see you back here at another episode of The Print University. 

81- Careers in Print: Outside the Print Shop

In this episode we explore roles in print that orbit around print shops: print buyers, advertising agencies, and print brokers.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, it's Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee, and we're here with another episode of The Print University. And this time we are talking about careers in print outside of the core print shop. Because the thing about the print industry, Ryan, is that there are a lot of jobs that people don't realize are part of our industry.
    • And it's important to understand the whole ecosystem, because it might be that you don't want to be a press operator. You might not want to be a color management expert, but you might still be intrigued enough by print to want to know where else you can fit. That's what we're going to try and talk about in this episode.
    • [00:00:39] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, a hundred percent. We've spent some episodes talking about all the different roles and how they're varied even in the print shop, everything, from the customer support representative to, like you said, the color specialist and so on. But then there's these other kinds of positions that orbit around print that usually are companies outside of the print shop. And that's really what we want to focus on today. The three top ones that we're going to talk about really are the print broker, the design/ad agency and print buyers. They all in different sort of ways, ultimately interface and work with people at the print service provider or the print shop.
    •  First, how would you define how each one of these are similar, but also different? 
    • [00:01:21] Pat McGrew: They're all involved in the business of print, right? So that, that's the notice, how they relate to a print service provider, but they they each are specialists in their own right.
    • Print brokers are people who are specializing in helping people buy print who are not print buying professions, right? They often work with, manufacturing companies retailers, all sorts of companies that have a need for print but maybe it's an irregular need for print, right? Once a year, they need holiday calendars or something. Alternatively, there are organizations that have simply recognized that they're never going to get everything handled and packaged up and delivered in the way they want if they try to do everything themselves. They use a professional who has a lot of print relationships who can place their work with the right printer at the right price with the right turnaround time for them. Print brokers fill a really interesting need. 
    • Design and ad agencies sometimes are their own print broker. Sometimes a design agency will decide that they might be building a multi channel campaign that has print elements and e-elements, and it may even have a lot of print elements. Banners hanging from helicopters, or stadium signage, movie posters. There's all sorts of things that they might be doing, as well as direct mail components, as well as mailed collateral components. It might even have packaging components. 
    • That agency knows that they have two ways that they can do things. They can either have an internal print broker who buys the print where they need to buy it, or they might engage a print broker to help them get everything placed, which is why we have that line going in that direction.
    • Print buyers are interesting professionals. They might be independent, they might be inside of an organization. A print buyer might work for a brand, right? Kellogg's. Mondelez, Ford... 
    • [00:03:20] Ryan McAbee: Any of those big brands, right? 
    • [00:03:22] Pat McGrew: Everybody. And in fact most of them do have people who are professional print buyers in that organization. They are the people who are responsible for getting the, all the print that might be designed from their agency, might be internally designed into a print environment so that it can be delivered back to them and put into use. 
    • The other group of print buyers some are specialists, right? Some specialize in, stadium printing, and others specialize in direct mail printing, and others specialize in even transaction printing. There are print buyers who specialize in placing things like your mortgage statement and your bank statement. 
    •  Then there are independent print buyers who work with a lot of different kinds of organizations because they've got a Rolodex of relationships that allow them to get that print placed at the right place in time. Difference between a print buyer and a print broker is, the devil's in the details.
    • [00:04:21] Ryan McAbee: I think it's a scale thing too, right? Like typically print brokers work with a lot of companies, whereas a print buyer may either work with one single company, their own company, or just that handful. 
    • [00:04:31] Pat McGrew: Yeah and they know the needs of their constituency and they're intimately familiar with it, much more expert in it.
    • Whereas a print broker is trying to be all things to all people. 
    • [00:04:42] Ryan McAbee: Very good point. The other thing I would just take from this graphic here is if you're on the print service provider side, it's always good to figure out who the ultimate end customer is. Because in the most complex chain that we have here, the originator could be the print buyer who's then going through the design ad agency to create the, do the creative part, and then who is then going through the print broker to source the print. Sometimes that creates a complex, more complex communication chain to actually execute the work, right? 
    • [00:05:11] Pat McGrew: It does, it can be very complex and if something goes wrong, there's a lot of fingers pointing in a lot of directions.
    • [00:05:19] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. When you talk about the superpowers that these type of roles really require, what do they really excel at? What is their core skill set they're bringing to the table? Let's start with the print buyer first. I think one of the key things for them is that if they're a print buyer within their own organization, they know that organization well.
    • Intimately, and they understand all the different types of print products that are needed throughout the life cycle, the calendar year, the life cycle of a product, et cetera, et cetera. They understand the brand styles and the brand details that have to be maintained.
    • It's all of that kind of intimate knowledge that they bring in kind of a decoder ring, if you will, to make sure that they can translate the business need for the print and the marketing and whatever else into, the specifications that we actually need for this print job. This one print job out of many that we have for the year.
    • [00:06:07] Pat McGrew: The print buyer is very often also, a print quality expert. 
    • [00:06:11] Ryan McAbee: Yes. 
    • [00:06:12] Pat McGrew: They are very often the first bridge you've got across in getting an approval to say, not only the soft approval, but then the final work, they will typically want to see it before they release it out into their ecosystem.
    •  They've got the expertise to understand the different print technologies. They understand what those print technologies are capable of and what they're not capable of. They understand if they're asking for different kinds of embellishments they've got the level of expertise to understand the difference between, cold foiling and digital embellishment. What happens when you use different kinds of print substrates. They understand The different substrates they understand the different papers and vinyls and coroplast and all the other things that someone might print on. 
    • They very often are the person that holds the budget for the print job. They've been told that this job has to come in here. So as they're getting bids either from the printers that they do business with, on a regular basis, or if it's a special kind of project and they're going outside of their core set, they know what they can spend and they are the person that you're going to have to get past if you want to win that job.
    • [00:07:25] Ryan McAbee: If you want to be a print buyer, the skill sets that immediately come to mind for me are, you need to be organized because you're going to be carrying on multiple projects at once and coordinating that information between all the constituents on your print buyer side at your company level, but also communicating with all the print service providers that are actually fulfilling the work.
    •  Then you need to really be detail oriented because when you're looking at the final product and output, like you said, doing kind of the proving and approvals process, if that colon is supposed to be a period you're expected to pick up on that kind of detail. 
    • [00:07:58] Pat McGrew: You end up becoming a walking encyclopedia of the capabilities of the printers you work with.
    • And in order to be that walking encyclopedia, you have to be in constant touch with them. You have to understand when they change equipment. When they upgrade equipment, they change finishing equipment. Sometimes, they change the provider. They change vendors for the equipment they're using, which could impact the kind of print that's possible. The print quality, the print options that are possible. You end up having to be that person as well. You become the walking encyclopedia of all the local printers and all the national printers you work with. Print buyers often they'll work with local printers, but sometimes they also work with trade printers.
    •  We've talked about trade printers in other episodes that they have a lot of options in who they can work with. So they tend to want to work with people who are going to turn around the work for them reliably, consistently every single time. 
    • [00:08:53] Ryan McAbee: That's right. Let's transition a little bit to the design and advertising agencies. And what are their superpowers look like when they're in those kinds of roles? 
    • [00:09:01] Pat McGrew: Agencies are an interesting animal because they come in a lot of different sizes. There are boutique agencies that only do one kind of work and then there are big global agencies that will do absolutely anything you want for you.
    •  Typically they're the people who are watching trends. They are the people who care about the Pantone color of the year. I might not but they absolutely do. 
    • [00:09:27] Ryan McAbee: You didn't like the lilac color from a year or two ago? 
    • [00:09:30] Pat McGrew: Yeah, exactly. They definitely care about those things. They're watching consumer trends but they're also watching Within certain markets, what the trends are. They know the difference between retailer needs in the Southeast U. S. versus the Northwest U. S. They typically will understand or have access to data that helps them define the kinds of work, the kinds of advertising, marketing, collateral that's going to help grow their constituents, their clients business.
    • They are however organizations that have high turnover as a rule. Interestingly, especially around the design and print aspects of an agency. Very often, people are contracted into an agency For specific campaigns and projects, and then when that one's done, they're out on the market looking for the next gig.
    •  The people in those organizations, you might be dealing with somebody who's seen everything and done everything and you might be dealing with somebody who's not seen everything and done everything. The level of expertise that would be ideal in those agencies is somebody who is very knowledgeable about their clients requirements understands the different options available for the different kinds of campaigns. They might want to run. 
    • They are absolutely the people who are going to be the brand police as we like to call them. Most major brands and a lot of even mid tier brands have brand guidelines and those books can be pretty interesting. If you've ever looked at one, they're specifying specific colors to be used in specific ways. They specify how logos can and can't be used. What colors can and can't be used with near the logos. How much white space has to be around them. There are a lot of specifics in those brand guidelines, and these agencies are responsible for co-developing those with their clients and then enforcing them when they send work out to be printed.
    • [00:11:31] Ryan McAbee: The other tip to consider is not, and it's a little bit because of the attrition challenge that you mentioned before, but it seems like the generational changes that have happened and newer people coming into the design ad space, they are designed for digital first mindset and skill set. You might have to spend time educating them on the basics of print and the fundamentals of print, like the fact that, if you're running on an analog press, you need trapping. And this is why, because that's foreign to them. So I would say that's another thing to keep in mind.
    •  Let's go on to the final one that's in this orbit around print, which is the print broker. The graphic here, it reminds me of the Octoman, Spider Man character. It's almost like you, as a print broker, you need multiple sets of hands because everything's going on with a bunch of different clients at once it seems. 
    • [00:12:19] Pat McGrew: A successful print broker is probably juggling anywhere from 20 to 40 clients. They are, they have relationships with, as many as 100 different printing companies of all different sizes, shapes, and specialties. A print broker, even if they specialize in certain areas, they need access to other kinds of printing because they never know when their customer is going to come to them and say, " I know we've been doing window graphics for the last 20 years, but we want to add some in store signage and we want to add, oh, those cute little pamphlets that sit at the cash register. We want to add some of those now." you've got to have somebody in your world who's going to be able to do that for them and do it for them at the price that they'll find attractive. We like to say jack of all trades and master of none. These guys have to be jack of all trades and master pretty much all of them. In order to really be successful.
    • I know a lot of print brokers and I've worked with print brokers for years and the people who do it well, just love that variability. They love being able to place just the right up with the right customer. That just gives them joy. When they retire, their clients often find it difficult to replace them because most of the print brokers I know, aren't training up the next generation behind them.
    •  Very often, these are independent agents who just they know everybody. They know all the vendors. They know all the printers. They know their clients really well. They serve them really well. It's going to be interesting to watch the next 5 or 10 years as there are more and more print broker retirements to see who comes up and fills the gaps.
    • We have seen agencies start to build themselves as being both the design agency and the print broker as some of their key feeders, print brokering feeders have left the industry. 
    • [00:14:11] Ryan McAbee: I feel like the print broker probably would have a really good skill set like something they would enjoy outside of work is putting together puzzles because I think that is right.
    • It's like we're trying to delicately take all this criteria and find a perfect match on the other side. And it's that kind of way of thinking that really attracts people to this kind of role. 
    • [00:14:31] Pat McGrew: They would be a candidate for the game show Lego Masters. 
    • [00:14:35] Ryan McAbee: I haven't watched that, but I should. 
    • [00:14:35] Pat McGrew: Oh, that one's good. Where you actually, you get assigned, build a boat that will actually float with Legos and you have, Oh, three hours go. And it's very interesting, but it's that kind of thing where, yeah it's that kind of skill set of being able to Tetris things together and make everything come out at the right price and at the right time for the clients that you're serving and with the print quality that they demand.
    • [00:14:57] Ryan McAbee: This is an interesting little sub orbital world around. We hope you've enjoyed this episode and will join us again next time at the Print University.

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