Seattle Bindery Newsletter: Issue No. 60. We welcome your comments.

1. Economic Brief. The size distribution of printing plants has shifted dramatically, says PIA Chief Economist Ronnie H. Davis. Since 1993, the number of small printing plants (characterized by nine or fewer employees) has dwindled annually, while at the same time the number of medium sized and larger plants has climbed. Davis speculates this is a sign of a maturing industry, with fewer startups each year and continued expansion for those plants still able to stay in business. In other news, WhatTheyThink.com and CAP Ventures released some promising results from their latest Print Buyer Pulse Index: 36% of print customers now expect their print spending to increase over the next six months. (Last month, only 28% of print customers planned to increase their spending.) Most of this added spending will come from larger accounts (annual budgets of $1 million or more), meaning mid to large commercial printers stand to benefit the most.  

2. More Tips from Dick Gorelick. Here’s one to improve your plant tours: when giving a tour, start at the shipping department and work backwards. Hand out a finished sample, pull out the completed job jacket that went with it and retrace the path that the piece took to be produced, from finish to start. After all, aren’t we always planning our jobs backwards and advising customers to do likewise? (Speaking of tours, we still offer boxed-lunch tours at Seattle Bindery, in case you’re interested.)

 3. Trendspotting. Is it just me, or has Wire-O gotten popular lately? It sure seems like we’ve seen lots of these in the past few months. Can anybody tell me why? We have had several runs ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 going off and on for 3 months. We love the work and don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but would sure like to better understand “why the ‘run’ on ‘em?” A Starbucks coupon for any ideas.

 4. Art and Science of Color. For those who know the frustration of explaining color compression to a customer, here’s a book you might relate to: Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, by science writer George Ball. Ball’s book provides plenty of examples throughout history in which artists faced limitations in the materials used to create their art. Ball even devotes a whole chapter to the topic: “A good blue is hard to find.” But according to Ball, what matters in the end is how the artist (and printer) works with the materials at hand to bring the imaginative vision to fruition. As painter Georgia O’Keefe once said (when she had her paintings reproduced in print): “It doesn’t really matter if the color isn’t absolutely right if the picture feels right when you finish the print.”  

5. Tip of the Week. How can you make sure foil stamping and embossing register correctly to printing? First, identify side guides and gripper and send us the rule up. If your sheet has to be guillotine-cut prior to finishing operations, it will affect the register further downstream in the process -- to what degree depends on factors like paper density, knife sharpness, clamp pressure, lift size, etc. Stamping is also very much like over-printing colors, so allow for a trap area--however, make the image you register to smaller than the area you plan to stamp. 


 
Return to Newsletter Archive

If you wish to receive our fax newsletter please contact Judy.
email her at judy@seattlebindery.com
Phone 425-656-8210
Fax 425-656-4400