Jillibean Soup Bean Talk: The Printing Process...

May 04, 2012

The Printing Process...

Well, the press check went well - the rest of my day was for the birds but that's that.

How about some printing pics? Couple things to understand first... we usually print on a larger printer that will print 6 papers up at one time. This is why we have 6 pieces in our collection (and why alot of manufacturers either have 6 or 12 in their collections). Unfortunately the large press was down for a couple of days so we had to use the smaller printer. With this printer size, we could only get 2 12x12.5 pieces up for a run. You'll see what I mean in a minute...

Here's the press. The paper actually loads at the end (far right in the pic) and then feeds through each of the towers.

Here's a better pic of the towers. Depending on the number of colors you're using - the towers hold the various colors. We print most of our products in 4/color which means they use 4 inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black or CMYK) to make up all of the colors in our lines.

Here's a top shot of the press - you can see the ink wells a the top. Pretty! Again, the paper is feeding from the very back there and comes towards the front where I'm standing.

Here's friendly foreman Steve pulling a pallet of our paper to be printed!

Here's friendly forman Steve loading the paper. We're giving him a hard time because the pressman (standing to the left) should be doing this, not the foreman! They're a great crew to work with.

This is where we get our final samples. You can see there's some Buckeye fans in the building! I guess since we're in Ohio and all...

The finished product. Sorry - should have taken more pics of the finished product. What happens in a press check - the pressman pulls up the product and matches it to the pre-press samples for color comparisons. Then I'm called in to get it to where I want it. Most of the time we're trying to tweak the Jillibean brown and it's not that easy. Colors can take on a whole different look depending on their surrounding colors so it's tricky. This set of 2 happens to be the TVs and Bite Size Bits up on one sheet. If we need to tweak the percentage of color, the pressman will use all those buttons at the bottom to make adjustments, run more paper through the press and then I check it again. We do this several times until I'm satisfied. Then I sign off and they run the remaining quantity. Then we wait for the next set to be run. It's time consuming but well worth it in the end!

If you're really interested in learning more about "offset printing", you can google it or read some basics here. Also, I did another post like this quite some time ago - you can see it here.

Jen tells me she has bunch of Button projects to send over so it's going to be a bit before I get the Designer Challenge finalists up! Thanks for your patience!

Happy National Scrapbook Day tomorrow! I'll be posting something special in the morning. :)