Ordering a quantity of print is often the easy part. Ensuring that each of your nationwide stores gets the correct number of them — that’s where things get challenging! Or ensuring that free standing units are packaged correctly and securely, with all the required parts, along with an assembly sheet. What about the simple convenience of having your orders shipped directly to your clients, confident in the knowledge that they’ve been labelled with your own branding rather than with your printer’s own labels?

Happily, we’re used to working like that in McGowan’s. Our job tracking systems contain all kitting instructions right from the beginning of your order, and our professional kitting team ensure that everything is packed just as you ask.

Together with four dedicated kitting zones, we can give even the largest orders the attention they deserve.

Setting up your artwork is straightforward if you follow a few simple guidelines.

Most importantly, you need to draw the outline of your shape over your artwork on a separate layer, and it must be a vector shape. There’s no need to send a keyline as a separate file; once it’s on a separate layer, it’s easy for us to match it up with your artwork, and ensure that it doesn’t appear on your print. Only vector keylines can be recognized by digital cutters, so avoid Photoshop® for this task.

Another feature of digital cutters is that they can crease substrates too. This is essential for items like display units, that need to be cut to shape, but also require creases to allow them to fold accurately. Crease lines can be added to your keyline layer in the same way as cut lines, but for clarity, they should be distinguished from each other. We recommend using a different colour for each line type. In the example below, we’ve drawn the cutting lines in blue, and the crease lines in magenta. It doesn’t matter which colours are used, as long as they are different.

Other points to consider when creating keylines include:

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. See if there is an existing keyline available that you can use or adapt for your needs.
• Watch out for areas that need to be glued. These should remain ink-free to ensure a strong bond.
• When saving your final artwork as a PDF, ensure that layers are preserved, and avoid flattening transparency.
• Avoid using your software to automatically create paths from selections, as this often results in keylines with so many points, that it will cut a very rough edge. Manually draw keylines whenever possible for best quality results.

Simple cutouts can often be done by any competent designer. For bespoke units, however, there are a lot of specialist factors that need to be considered, especially if it has to hold heavy products. It is often more economical to liase with a cardboard engineer to avoid making costly mistakes. Contact us for more details about this service.

Although it’s possible to create a small file that will print big, usually large format graphics require equally large files. Getting those files to the printer quickly and efficiently used to be a challenge, but thankfully nowadays, there are plenty of free services to help you send your artwork, without resorting to disks and courier services.

Before you send…

Regardless of what method you use to send your files, you should always try and keep your file size under control. There are limits to the speed they can travel through the internet, so for rush jobs, the biggest speed boost you can achieve is to spend a minute or two making sure your artwork is saved efficiently. Here are a few ways to achieve that:

1. Are you sending native files? Consider sending PDFs instead. Properly saved PDFs are generally smaller, and print more reliably, than native files, especially when you factor in all the supporting fonts and images.
2. Use a reasonable resolution. Convention holds that all print files (at actual size) should be around 300 dpi, and that’s a good guide for small format printing. Large format work can actually be reduced to 150 dpi with no loss of print quality. Anything above that won’t be noticeable… except in how long they take to send!
3. Only send what you need. It’s surprisingly common for people to send a folder full of files, when they only require 3 of them to be printed. It’s a quicker decision to make, but it’s also a false economy that will incur a heftier time penalty than spending a few seconds picking out the correct files.

These may be common sense precautions for some, but they’re easily overlooked when you’re under pressure. Assuming your files are now ready, let’s look at some ways of sending them over.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a way of uploading and downloading files to a server. Most web browsers can be used to download files from an FTP site, but to upload, you’ll need a special piece of software called an FTP Client. FileZilla and Cyberduck are solid options, but there are others.

FTP can work in one of two ways. If you have access to your own FTP server, you can upload your files there, and send us an email with details of where it can be downloaded from (host, username and password). We’ll then download your files and begin work on them.

The other option is to contact us for our FTP details. We can give you access to a folder where you can upload your files to. From an overall speed perspective, there’s usually not much advantage to one method over the other, and it usually comes down to what’s more convenient for you. For example, if you don’t have your own FTP server, then using ours is obviously the better option. If you do have your own server, it’s often more convenient to use that. Just be aware that, depending on your IT infrastructure, uploading to your own server may seem very fast, but don’t forget that we still have to download the files, which will generally take longer.

Email

A simpler way to send files is as email attachments. There are size limitations, so it’s not an option for extremely large files, but if your email provider allows it, you can safely send anything up to 30mb directly to us. Please check with your own provider first to confirm what size they will allow you to send. After all, you don’t want to wait 20 minutes for a file to leave your outbox, only to find it bounced back a few minutes later!

File Sending Service

Somewhere in between FTP and Email, there are a number of competing file sending services to help you overcome the limitations of email. The generally work by allowing users to upload their large files to a website, and then an email is sent to the intended recipient with a link from where they can download the file.

Many of the best services, such as WeTransfer.com and YouSendIt.com, offer generous free packages which are perfectly suited for getting large files from A to B. They also have a number of premium services which are worth considering for regular users.

File Hosting Services

As cloud computing gains momentum, many people are storing their files online so they can access them from anywhere. One of the great side-effects of this is that it allows files to be shared easily. Although this feature is often used for collaboration among teams, it also means that you can give permission to your printer to download your finished artwork.

Dropbox is the big name in online storage, offering a rich array of services for free, but there are others, such as Box.com, Google Drive and SkyDrive. All these services have a free option which is great for light users, and paid options if you need extra storage or features. Third party developers, like Wappwolf and IfThisThenThat, build additional features on top of these services to help automate common tasks.

It’s in everyone’s interest to get their jobs printed right first time, every time, on time. And with ever decreasing deadlines, the pressure is on to eliminate any scope for error. Here at McGowan’s, we pride ourselves on checking out for most common problems that plague print production, and are currently implementing an automated system to streamline the process even further.

Nevertheless, any error, even if it’s caught in time, has the potential to delay your job. After all, if we pick up on something that needs customer attention, we’re not going proceed with costly printing until we’ve made contact with the client. If the point-of-contact is at a meeting or otherwise unavailable, the delays only increase.

With that in mind, here are ten of the most common problems that can cause delays, and how to solve them.

10: Incorrect specifications.

Sometimes, you’re just looking for a ballpark quote, and give us rough measurements to work with for pricing purposes. That’s fine, unless the same ballpark specs get used for your purchase order too. When they don’t match the artwork supplied, the job has to go on hold, pending review.

To avoid this, simply make sure all sizes and quantities are correct before sending in your final order. Also make sure that all artwork on your order is accounted for, and that any missing files are noted so that we can proceed with the rest of your order in a timely fashion.

9: Use PDFs

PDF stands for Portable Document Format, which is an apt description. The file that leaves your desktop should look identical on any other computer, and generally will print as you expect it to. All modern print workflows are built on top of PDF, which makes them the file format of choice.

In the early days of digital print, many designers output files as EPS, because it was as close to a portable format as we had back then. Nowadays, even Adobe recommend that people consider PDF as the smarter choice. Those few remaining ‘if it ain’t broke’ designers who still use EPS, should reconsider, especially given that PDF files will always get to press quicker.

The same applies to other native document formats, especially Office software like Microsoft Word. Often, these documents don’t translate intact from one computer to another, and this can delay your job further by requiring additional proofing stages. Thankfully, many applications can now output PDFs, and there are free PDF print drivers available for any that don’t.

8: Too much resolution.

True, setting up your files at a higher resolution than you need is a safer bet than having your files at a resolution that’s too low. There are a few downsides, however. If you’re in a hurry, and you need us to download your file from a hosted service, it could take literally hours if it’s unnecessarily large. We have occasionally been supplied with business card artwork that has been over 1 gigabyte in size; when we resave them correctly, the file size can be reduced a hundredfold. If that had been done before uploading, the job could potentially be delivered in the time it takes to just download the larger file!

As a general rule, small format work at actual size should be approximately 300dpi, and large format is fine at 150dpi. Adjust these figures according to scale — for example, if you need your artwork to be enlarged 200% by us, then double the resolution to allow for that.

These are just guidelines, however, and most artwork prints fine if it’s within 30-50% of these figures. Sometimes you can even get away with a lot less, especially with large format work being viewed at a distance (e.g. Billboards)

7: Sensible Scaling.

Ideally, artwork should be set up at actual size. However, this isn’t always possible, especially with large format work. In such cases, time can be saved by designing artwork at a simple scaling factor, and adding that to the file name.

For example, if you have a large banner set up at half size, you could call it something like ‘My Banner @50%.pdf‘, or ‘My Banner (half size).pdf‘. In such cases, we can see at a glance that it should be enlarged, and by how much, eliminating confusion. Scaling at half, quarter, tenth size are all perfectly acceptable, or any other figure that’s clear.

Conversely, less-than-helpful examples of scaling include: random scaling to make the artwork fit roughly in the middle of an A3; substituting inches for metres; disproportional artwork (e.g. supplying an A4 ad to be used in a 60″×40″ poster). We can usually fix up difficult scaling factors; it just takes a little longer.

6: Spot Colours.

If your job genuinely requires a spot colour, be sure to let us know when quoting. In the vast majority of cases, it probably doesn’t, so convert all your Pantone colours to CMYK. This is especially true if your files use transparencies, effects or overprints. The vast majority of digital print jobs don’t require spot colours — let alone 20 of them! — so converting them earlier on can save a lot of time later.

Of course, digital presses can do a certain amount of conversion for you, but for various technical reasons, they may need a LOT of manual intervention, depending on how they’re used. And that means time.

5: Use PDF Presets

It’s difficult to remember every setting required for creating PDFs, and when a deadline is looming, it’s all too easy to forget about bleed, crops, or any number of other factors that could cause the job to be returned for resaving.

Most Adobe products allow you to save a working set of parameters as a preset. Set it once, and forget about it. When a job is ready to go, select the preset, and all the parameters will be filled in correctly and consistently.

Not sure what settings to use? Here’s a ZIP file with a few presets that you can import into your favourite Adobe product (unzip it before use, and use the Adobe PDF Presets tool to import them): McGowans PDF Presets

4: Set up a Preflight Profile

Surprisingly, most issues with PDF files are common things, like fonts not being embedded, white objects being set to overprint, low resolution images, and so on. Some of these problems can be corrected, while others can only be brought to a customer’s attention.

Knowing about problems before sending your file to print can save a lot of time. For example, if you discover that the resolution of one of your images is too low, but you’re OK with that, you can indicate that in your order, so it doesn’t get pulled out of production pending customer approval.

But who has time to check everything that could be wrong with your file? If you have Acrobat Pro, you don’t have to! It has a Preflight tool that can be set up to run a series of checks, and automatically provide you with a report of any potential issues.

Rather than setting this up yourself, here’s a sample Preflight Profile you can download and import into Acrobat. Run it on your next file to get a heads up on issues before they happen (unzip before use, and use the Preflight tool to import them): McGowans Preflight Profiles

3: Let us do the planning

Things change quickly in digital print, and it’s not so long ago when designers used to pick a sheet size, and squeeze in as many copies of their artwork as possible, to try and make the best use of the sheet and, hopefully, save on costs.

This made sense back in the day when designers ordered film separations from one company, and brought them to a different company to print. But with digital print, this time-consuming process will actually work against you.

State of the art imposition and nesting software allows us to send individual jobs to different paper sizes, possibly alongside similar jobs from other customers to achieve the most cost- and time-efficient production possible. This happens instantly, but can only be done if you avoid planning it up yourself. That’s less work for you, and quicker output from us; a real win-win situation!

2: Use Output Preview

In an ideal world, a hard copy proof should accompany every order, but as we move increasingly online, it’s not always practical. To make sure your job prints reliably, there are a few simple steps you can take.

First, use your design software’s preview facilities, which are normally turned off by default. For example, in Acrobat, there is an ‘Output Preview’ tool that will show you what you can reasonably expect the printed product to look like. If it looks completely different to what you expect, at least it’s better to find out now, before it’s printed.

Secondly, if you’re happy with how it looks, take a screen shot, and send it with your files. PDFs can render slightly differently in some circumstances, but a screen shot is almost as good as a hard copy proof.

1: Ask!

Every job is different, and no matter how experienced you are, there are always going to be difficult challenges. If you’re not sure how to approach a print job, don’t bulldoze your way through it and hope for the best. Ask for advice at the earliest sign of trouble; we’re here to help!

From traditional printing background, I can recall the horror involved when a request to print anything bigger than B1 or heavier than a 400gsm board was made. There were very few alternatives to doing smaller runs, other than printing on paper, laminating and mounting. If the print was to be used outdoor, a suitable vinyl was used and mounted to the appropriate substrate. Obviously this extra labour brought added costs, so it became immediately impractical from a financial and manufacturing standpoint. If there was a particular shape needed, a very steady hand with a scalpel was deemed necessary.

So, how have things changed over the years?

Well, if volumes were very big, there has been only ever one option for printing direct, that was to traditionally screen print the job, this still stands today, but the reliance on this technology isn’t what it used to be. The introduction of the UV ‘digital’ generation of flatbed printers has been a speedy affair and who knows where it will end. There was immediately huge interest in these flatbed machines. Manufacturers like Inca, Nur, Vutek, Durst all gained early ground and revolutionised the production schedules for many a print company. These days it seems that every machine manufacturer, large or small, will have a digital flatbed offering in its arsenal.

It then seemed to hit a bit of a wall, in a Production sense, where you couldn’t really find a flatbed press that was capable of doing 20 sheets per hour. By sheets I mean, standard 8’ x 4’ (2440mm x 1220mm), bigger than most screen flatbed capacities. The sheet I’m referring to might be pulp, plastic, foam, paper, basically anything that was 20mm thick or less. This was starting to become a problem for buyers and printers alike, as the initial surge of interest in the presses seemed to die as the limitations in speed grew more and more evident, particularly when compared to conventional flatbed. So, the niche was filled and they were doing small runs and anything over 40-50 sheets went the screen road.

In more recent years, new presses have come on the market, these machines would bridge the gap between the small run and the long run work. Agfa, HP, Durst and Inca have been at the forefront by introducing these UV inkjet technologies into our workplaces. Agfa went the extra step, with the novel idea of merging the old with the new, by putting a fully functional screen unit on the back of their digital print press, the MPress Tiger, enabling the printer to do spot colours or varnishing. This press can get you up to 150 sheets per hour and it only promises to get faster as it’s a fully automated process from feed to delivery. The material handling on the unit can process 500 sheets per hour, so we could theoretically get there, so long as they keep upgrading the Digital carriage. Speed boosts are coaxed from every element of the printer design—from the mechanics of media handling to minimising vibration to ensure accurate drop placements. Agfa have introduced a smaller version, The MPress Leopard, which is a semi-automatic unit, manual loading, without the screen unit the Tiger has. This press will give you in the region of 75 sheets per hour. HP have been hugely successful with their offering, the HP FB7500, which in the last 4 weeks has been upgraded to the HP FB7600, the difference is multi-loading functionality. Inca and Durst have made similar gains.

Of course, the traditional superpowers still have a role to play. To date, no Litho company in Ireland has introduced the type of machinery that is being run across the water in England, presses like the KBA Rapida 162, which has a sheet span of 1620mm x 1200mm. Maybe the market isn’t there for us here in Ireland, but there are approximately 400 of these machines in Production throughout the world. The modern day screen presses have become full colour or 2 colour automatic output devices, while all the screen-making devices are state of the art pieces of equipment, where you can have screens burned in minutes.

Take the last General Election gone a couple of years ago. I doubt if there has ever been a more even spread of the technologies used in the outputting of the poster boards that are a big part of every campaign. Taking into account the usual downward pressure on margins that goes with increased competition for market share and the time constraints on this election, due to political manoeuvring, the Digital sector was awarded a disproportionate volume of boards to produce, when compared to previous campaigns, usually the preserve of the larger screen houses. It is my opinion that the 2 technologies could and should co-exist as advances are made. It’s not a race against each other per se, but it’s being driven by the need of the buyer for cheaper, quicker printing, regardless of the volumes required. The recession we’ve witnessed on this island in recent times has become somewhat of an opportunity for the wide format suppliers of retailers, as the retailer tries to drive the footfall up. Previously we would see a replenishing of in-store POS once a month, now it’s weekly. The lack of printing for the fatigued construction industry has been more than replaced by the retailer’s quest to react to the competition and keep takings up.

I haven’t touched on quality, as it’s simply a given. Spot colour printing remains the benchmark for quality, the CMYK job comparisons between technologies are by and large too small to mention but it’s fairly obvious to the trained eye which one is used. UV banding is a thing of a past and a depth and richness of colour and gradients is achievable, particularly on skin tones that were previously impossible to hit and the absolute bane of a print operator’s day. Inkjet manufacturers in the 1990s adopted six-colour printing to substitute lighter colours for darker counterparts in highlights and quarter tones. This tonal substitution technique was implemented to help overcome visual graininess inherent in fixed dot, large droplet inkjet technology. The added colours helped produce smoother quarter- and mid-tones and smoother, less-grainy gradients.

Variable dot printing renders six-colour printing obsolete. The ability to vary the drop size to as little as six picoliters produces sharp images with smoother gradients and quarter tones by placing a small and varying amount of ink at every pixel location without completely filling the space with colour. The ability to jet larger droplets up to 42 picoliters enables the printer to saturate the entire pixel space for the production of uniform, solid colours.

Where will it all go in the future?

Judging from the past, there is no natural evolution of what the machines of the future will be able to do, as there have been so many progressions made by so many manufacturers. Spot colour and metallic ink capacity will soon be standard, larger sheets and top of the range quality will be in evidence, but the biggest advance will surely be on output speeds and in-line finishing processes that will include die-cutting, clueing and varnishing. Kongsberg and Zund cutting tables have become a staple part of any forward thinking print company’s suite. The ability to cut to shape, any substrate, in a timely fashion cannot be underestimated. Since the earliest efforts in flatbed UV-curable ink printing we have had print speed increases of almost 1,000 percent. One fertile area for improvement is the operator workflow. Depending on your business profile, there could be bottlenecks at different points. Large format manufacturers are trying to reduce those bottlenecks by providing better uptimes for the machine, smoother colour management, and better cutter technology. It’s really no longer enough to say, ‘I’m going to make a faster printer,’ you have to look at productivity from end to end. Still, some print experts do insist further speed gains can come from a UV flatbed. There are no technology barriers to increased printing speeds in UV-curable flatbeds as there are with solvent or latex inks, so expect printing speeds to continue to double every two to three years as piezoelectric printhead nozzle density increases and the cost per nozzle decreases.

UV technology’s popularity is aided by the increasing push from businesses and print buyers for “greener”, more sustainable solutions. Direct-to-substrate printing eliminates landfill waste, while the UV inks themselves have proven less noxious than their solvent competitors.

It will be a case of ‘watch this space’ as the demand increases for faster and better kit, in order to stay ahead and keep up with the demand of the end user. One thing’s for sure, anyone in the trade deciding not to at least monitor the progression from where we are now and stick to what they know will not even stand still. It simply won’t be possible to compete in future years, with the technology that’s available nowadays. Yes, these machines are prohibitively expensive, but what would the cost be to the business to not invest? It’s an incalculable risk whatever you go with.

For UV flatbeds to evolve, they’ll require reliability and additional speed gains. Single pass printing is really the Holy Grail of the industry. Whoever delivers that technology would make a quantum leap in print speeds. 4 pass printing is practical, 2 pass also, but with some compromise on the image quality.

So, as mentioned above regarding possible developments – Watch this space, be ready.

Available in an endless variety of forms, they also have other uses, such as suggestion boxes, donation boxes, ballot boxes, and so on.

We also have an entry box keyline available for free download, if you want to get started quickly!

McGowans are proud to introduce you to the latest in exhibition graphics – Clever Frame® is a system of mobile aluminium frames, which can be combined in any configuration. In every frame, on each side, you can exchange banners placed magnetically with graphics in the blink of an eye.

Combining the frames is extremely easy, therefore, creating sizeable exhibition constructions or small promotional walls to points where you are presenting your company or products, becomes fabulously simple. Therefore, you become independent of space, because depending on the needs, you can decrease or increase your configuration.

Or maybe change its shape, if you want to draw the Client’s attention to a new product?

Clever Frame® adapts to you, and not vice versa.

If, in addition, can you imagine that at any time, without additional cost, you can change your message and the shape of the construction, and that you get dozens of products in the price of one, you can also imagine the savings. Imagine Clever Frame® – the Swiss army knife for marketing.

What would entice a company to involve themselves in Wide Format Printing?

To answer the question and the reason I omitted the word ‘Print’ in the above line before ‘company’ is that not only print companies decide to make this step. Indeed, some design outlets, print management companies, advertising houses and traditional signage providers, among others, have thought it important that producing large format prints to some level or another is a step that they must take, or a demand is placed on them by a client that this is the way they must go.  It’s important primarily to understand what background the company has and what the current mindset is of the management and staff. I make this observation as Wide Format printing comes with a whole different set of requirements, terminologies and values as opposed to the traditional forms of print manufacturing.

When I say ‘Wide Format Printing’, it encompasses such a multitude and to avoid confusion, I specifically mean anything that can’t be done routinely on a conventional screen or litho press. This might be a small run of A1 posters that would render the pre-press work so expensive, that it would be folly in an economic sense to consider this method. After that then there are things like exhibition graphics, pvc banners, hoardings, vehicle graphics, in-store point of sale, mesh building wraps, canvas printing, outdoor media like billboards, bus graphics, shelter posters and I could keep listing bespoke commodities all day and we’d still not cover a fraction of it.

In my experience the main difference when talking to a client about their large format needs isn’t the same as discussing with the same client an order for a booklet or a set of flyers. The interpretation the buyer has and that of the production company often differ wildly and there have been occasions in the past, after receipt of a job a call is made by the buyer and it goes something like, ‘that’s not what I ordered!’. There are so many different substrates and finishes that it is an immediate imperative to understand some basic starting points:

• Is it to be rigid or rolled?
• Is it to be used indoor or outdoor?
• Is it to be used again?
• How long has it to be in place?
• Who is putting the piece up?
• Who is taking it down
• Where is it going?
• Adhesive to front or rear?

Again I could go on but the answers to these questions are what the production company will need to have answered before you start pre-press. At times there seems that there can be too many conversations and time spent on a small project and I’ve had many a client become a tad grumpy under this type of ‘grilling’, but there are just so many variables and this is why anyone tempted to explore the wide format option in production must be ready for a shift in culture and mindset by the relevant staff and a welcoming of an erosion of margin before the job ticket is printed! I have been asked on more than a few instances to quote for a job when the only bit of spec I might get has been ‘fairly big’, ‘a really huge print’ or ‘a cheap sign’. Companies that consider themselves as ‘jobbers’ and enjoy a seamless transit of work from client through Customer service and production will not always make a good bedfellow with Wide Format printing.

I have been asked previously as to what period of time a ROI might be arrived at. It really is an impossible question to answer and it’s going to be different from one provider to the next, depending on the adaptation by staff of their new discipline. If it comes easy, the education of the new offerings will transfer to the buyer/ client and it might be a lot sooner than you think, if you’re judging it against ROI on traditional output devices, that often carry a far higher price tag. Anyone still tempted at this stage will obviously have a market for it and are currently outsourcing their large format, so have a basic understanding to transfer to the end user. They will do a lot of homework in choosing their weapon of output device. This is another conversation that we might have another day on these pages.

An entry box can be used for competitions, as a donation box, a suggestion box, or any purpose that requires feedback from your potential customers.

Keyline Specifications

Entry_Box_3.pdf

McGowans Print are delighted to have been involved in this freezer build project. This is another great example of the power and versatility of digital print.

The finished product makes a fantastic impact, and demonstrates a number of notable features, including:

• Hard wearing full colour floor graphics;
• High impact headers and kickers;
• White backed prints on clear vinyl;
• Canopies digitally die cut for additional visual interest;
• Arches at the ends of each aisle to finish off the in-store theatre.

Despite the variety of digital printing techniques employed, colour consistency was maintained throughout.

In-store graphics are often characterised by a variety of brands jostling for attention. However, this display demonstrates that by treating large areas of your retail space as one coherent unit, the overall impact is greatly increased.