Season’s Greetings / 2021-22 Holiday Schedule

Happy Holidays

Enjoy the Season!

We want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support in 2021. We appreciate the opportunities for success that you’ve given us. Our 2022 New Year’s resolution is the same as it is every year: To look for better ways to serve you and provide the best possible experience when you consider your printing needs.

We wish you a prosperous 2022 (and beyond!) and most especially, to you and your family a safe and happy holiday season!

Your friends at Business Printers!

Offset and Digital Printing                Large Format Printing
Promotional Products                Bulk Mailing Services

Our 2021-2022 holiday schedule

Does Your Vinyl Banner Fly High?

DOs and DON’TS for ordering Vinyl Banners

Banners are large! 

Banner printing requires a bit more care in preparation. Consider the size of the banner, whether you’re getting grommets and/or pole pockets and the physical location of where the banners will be placed.

Don’t use web graphics.

Since You need high resolution images, make sure that your jpg, png or tiff at least 150 dpi at the final image size. Avoid gif or bmp files. They don’t contain enough color information for good results. While have the capability of increasing the resolution of an image, not all images up-scale well. It’s best to begin with high resolution images at the size they will print on the banner.

Do use vector graphics.

Vector graphics can be resized without loss of resolution are the best option for large graphics.

Don’t forget about bleeds. 

Bleeds? What is that? If your artwork extends to the edges of your banner, your artwork needs to extend at least 1/4” past the trim size of the banner. This prevents cutting variations from giving you unexpected results.

Use CMYK color mode.

We can convert RGB mode to CMYK “on the fly” but the conversion can change some colors.

Do save your art as a high resolution PDF.

Less is more.

Keep it simple. Your vinyl banner should convey most of it’s message with just a glance or two.

Keep finishing options in mind.

Avoid important art elements inside of hem stitching, pole pocket loops and grommets. Pole pockets require careful attention to the final size of your banner.

Ask

Ask us for help before you even get started. We can supply templates and tips for proper artwork setup. Ask

Does your banner need to pass wind?

If your banner will be located in a windy area, specify wind slits to prevent damage!

For more information and pricing estimates on banners, please visit our Vinyl Banner Printing web page.

Why custom printed promotional items work

Why are custom printed promotional items such a great marketing tool? They keep your branding in front of your customer for a longer time than a typical marketing flyer or postcard. These items are also often passed on to others by the original recipient. However some promotional items are more popular than others and will deliver your marketing message over a longer period of time.

Nearly everyone has some sort of technology these days. Accessories personalized with your company’s message are an effective way to keep your company in front of your customer. Consider promotional items such as cases, covers, selfie sticks, flash drives emblazoned with your company message as give-aways during trade shows, promotions and events.

Custom printed promotional items for travel

People travel and they drink beverages. Coffee and travel mugs are an effective means of delivering your marketing message. They move around with your customer, making your branding and message a constant companion for your customer.

Other great and effective promotional products are keychains, magnets, kitchen items and desk accessories.

Whatever product you choose for your promotional campaign, keep a few things in mind:

Tips for choosing your custom printed promotional item

Choose a promotional item that relates to your business. Pay attention to your customers’ needs. Are you a B2B company or do your products sell directly to the consumer? Are your customers mainly male, female, young, older? These are important things to think about when choosing a promotional item for your marketing campaign.

Keep marketing trends in mind

Pick trendy items, that are of interest to your customers.

Choose high quality items.

The promotional items you hand out are a reflection of your business. If you give away cheaply made products, you’ll give the wrong impression about your business.

Keep it simple!

Don’t try to cram a lot of information into a small item. Your message should fit the size of the promotional item. Promotional items are not necessarily sales closers. They’re meant to keep your customers aware of your business.

We ship anywhere in the USA

You don’t necessarily have to pick a promotional printing company near you. Most, like Business Printers will ship anywhere in the United States.

We offer hundreds of custom printed promotional items in 72 different categories. We have a promotional items for almost every need, from awards and automobile items to sports, health and wellness. Please visit our website’s custom printed promotional items page for more information and to request estimates.

What you don’t really need to know about graphic formats for printing!

This is good stuff to know. But you don’t really need to know it! When you order a print job from us, we take care of these details for you, so you can make better use of your precious time!

If you really want to learn why graphics formats are important, read on. But go get a cup of joe to keep you awake…

Graphics Resolution

Not all graphics are created equal. It’s a common error to try and use graphics designed for a web page for printing. There are three main issues to consider: The resolution of web graphics is optimized for a computer or smart phone display and is too low to print a quality image on an offset press or digital press. The color mode of web graphics is light additive, or RGB while the color mode for printing is subtractive or CMYK. Finally, there are special considerations for printing spot (Pantone™) colors.

Web graphics are bitmapped graphics optimized for viewing on a computer monitor. These are usually jpg, png, tiff, gif or bmp files. Computer monitors (and smartphone monitors) display images at a resolution of 72 pixels per inch, or dots per inch. For best quality a printed image needs to be printed at a resolution of 300 dots per inch at the size that the image will be printed. The problem gets even worse when an image is enlarged:

The image on the left is a 300 dpi image suitable for printing, and the image on the right is an enlarged 72
dpi web graphic. So how do you avoid this? The best way is to start with a high resolution image of 300 dpi or more. Reduce the size of your images in Photoshop or a similar graphics application so that the resolution of the final image is 300 dpi at the size that it will print. Anything above 300 dpi is not necessary unless you’re using a .bmp black and white image with no grays. If your image is grayscale or monochrome (similar to a black and white photo) 150 dpi is optimal.

At Business Printers, we use AI to increase the resolution of your images if they’re not up to par for printing. But if you want to do this yourself, avoid enlarging the image as much as possible. If you have absolutely no choice but to use an enlarged web graphic in your print project, use a graphics app such as Adobe Photoshop to enlarge the image. Photoshop and other newer artificial intelligence apps use complicated algorithms to try and fill in the empty dots caused by enlarging the image. The new AI apps do a really great job at enlarging, but the result is not always as good as starting out with a quality high resolution image. At a bare minimum, you can go down as low as 200 dpi at the final print size, but will see image degradation. 

Use a vector image. They can be resized to your heart’s content without loss of resolution. Vector graphics are created by applications such as Adobe Illustrator and the filenames usually end in .ai or .eps. Be careful that your vector graphic doesn’t contain embeded low resolution bitmapped graphics. Vector graphics are required for multi-colored spot color printing. We check these things out for you before your job leaves pre-press.

Never use GIF files! Not only are they generally low resolution graphics optimized for computer displays, but they also don’t contain enough color information to produce accurate color when printed. Even we can’t perform miracles!

CMYK vs. RGB vs. Spot color modes

OK, so you have a graphic with the proper high resolution at the size that it will be printed. The next thing to consider is the color mode of the graphic.

RGB color mode is an “additive” color used by displays for rendering images. Colors are creating by mixing red, green and blue (RGB) light. The more light that is added, the brighter and more intense the color becomes.

CMYK mode is a “subtractive” mode that is required for all printing. Colors are created by mixing cyan, yellow, magenta and black inks on the sheet of paper. All offset and digital presses use the CMYK color mode, as well as office and home laser and inkjet printers.

Spot color mode: Each individual ink color is created by printing the image with a specific ink. Think of it like painting a wall. If you want a pink wall, you go out and buy pink paint. In spot color printing, if you want an image to be pink, the printer uses pink ink. It’s not feasible to print in full color using individual inks. Spot color printing is best suited for one and two color ink printing. In the United States, printing companies all use the Pantone Matching System for specifying individual ink colors.

If you have an RGB image that you want to print, most modern home, office and digital pre-press systems can convert RBG color mode to CMYK on the fly. In fact, if you’re printing to your inkjet or laser printer it’s usually better to start off with and RBG image because they’re designed to convert them on the fly. However, on a press, it’s better to supply a CMYK image. RGB images can produce a much wider range of colors than CMYK. So when an RBG image is converted to CMYK, there can be color changes where the image uses colors that can’t be reproduced in the printing process. It’s desirable to see those image variations before printing thousands of pieces! We convert RBG images for you before you see your first proof!

The effects of converting RGB to CMYK are easy to illustrate when printing black inks. When RGB black is converted to CMYK, you’ll get a mix of colors, usually 75% cyan, 68% magenta, 67% yellow and 90% black. While this will produce a nice black image, it’s not practical for printing because it produces 300% ink coverage and the ink probably won’t dry for a long time! So it’s best to make the conversion to CMYK using an application like Photoshop and fine tune the colors so you get what you expect in your print project. In the case of black for example, black text should be 0% cyan, 0% magenta, 0% yellow and 100% black. For larger areas of black ink, 0,0,0,100 will look a bit gray, so we use “Rich Black” to get an intense black. It’s kind of like adding a extra coat of black paint on a wall. Printing companies use different mixes for Rich Black, but the most common is 50% cyan, 40% magenta, 40% yellow and 100% black. We take care of rich black conversions behind the scenes so you don’t have to worry about it!

Spot Colors

Sometimes called Pantone™ color printing, spot color printing is preferable when color fidelity is of utmost importance, such as in logos and corporate identity projects. We match a Pantone™ color by mixing the ink using a formula established by the Pantone company. It’s not practical to use spot color printing when a full color image is involved as there are millions of colors in the image. Artwork for spot color jobs need to be created using vector images with applications such as Adobe Illustrator. The folks at Pantone LLC who own the trademark and developed the Pantone Matching System really made spot color printing a lot easier for everyone. Think of all those paint swatches at your local home improvement store. Pantone Matching system is the printing ink equivalent of that.

Are you still awake? Visit us for all your printing needs: www.bizprinters.com

How to Prepare a Print-Ready PDF File

Careful preparation of PDF files is important for a press job!

How To Take Best Advantage Of Business Card Deals

Get the most bang for your buck from that business card sale!

You just received a crazy offer for business cards. Now what do you do? Here are a few hints to help you keep that amazing deal amazing! Check the details! Can you get full color? Both sides? How many do you get? How good is the business card stock offered? Does the offer include any coatings? How long before your job ships? Is the shipping charge reasonable?

At the very least, the offer should include full color printing on both sides. The card stock should be substantial too. You should get at least a 14 point coated cover (cover=card stock) or thicker. Most printers will also offer a high gloss UV coating to protect the business cards after they’re printed.

If the quantity offered is less than 500, the card stock is thinner and no coatings are offered, the business cards will likely be digitally printed instead of traditional offset printing. There’s nothing wrong with digital printing… The process just can’t accommodate the range of papers that can otherwise be printed using traditional methods. For example, digitally printed products can’t be coated with a high gloss or semi gloss coating after printing. Most printing companies offer digital printing quality that is just as high as traditional offset printing.

Check the shipping terms. It shouldn’t take two to three weeks for the cards to get printed and shipped. Look for turn-around times less than a week. For example, our current business card offer 1,000 full color cards for 10 bucks has a turn-around time of 2-3 days. How long will it take to arrive once the cards ship is also a consideration. Look for a printer with facilities around the country to get shorter transit times. Again as an example, we ship overnight at ground rates to the northeast (NY, PA, NJ), parts of the midwest (TN, OH, IL, KY, IN), Southern California and Las Vegas. Most of the rest of the country except the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies gets 2 day shipping at ground rates. The most it will take to ship most of our products is 3 days at ground rates.

Is the shipping cost reasonable? Look for the cost of shipping a box or two of business cards in the continental USA to cost between $8 and $12. Any more than that and the “offer” could be inflating shipping charges to subsidize the cost of printing.

How do you prepare the artwork? You can do it yourself or have a graphic designer to do it for you. If you do it yourself, you can save a lot of money, but getting professional looking business cards requires some attention to details. Check out or artwork guidelines and bleed and safe zone guidelines.

If you create your artwork in Microsoft Word (or any art layout app), make sure you have the right size… The final size of a standard US business card is 3.5 x 2 inches. Prepare your artwork so that the size is 3.75 x 2.25 inches to account for bleed. Don’t put anything important in the 1/8” border from the edge of the sheet. Again see our bleed and safe zone guidelines.

Use high resolution jpegs or vector graphics (at least 300 dpi at the final size). Don’t pull an image from the web because the resolution will be too low for printing and your cards will look cheesy! There could also be copyright issues if you use someone else’s images.

Finally save your artwork as a high resolution PDF file. It’s important that the image is the correct size. If the printer has to stretch your artwork to fit, you’ll get ovals instead of circles and generally a very low quality business card will result. For more information, check out our Help page.

No matter how great the deal looks, don’t be afraid to contact the printer and ask questions!

My Business Cards Bleed!

What is a bleed in printing?

A bleed in the jargon of offset printing, digital printing or large format printing means that a printed sheet has ink printed right to the edge of the paper. For example, this business card has ink all the way to the edge of the sheet (a bleed):

To produce a bleed, the image needs to extend larger than the final trim size of the sheet. The image is printed on a larger sheet so that the bleed area and crop marks fit completely inside the sheet. After printing, the sheet is then trimmed down to size, cutting off the extra image and crop marks. In this example, the artwork was extended by 1/8″ all around, creating a “1/8″ bleed”, then printed on a larger sheet:

There are two main reasons we need to do this. On a printing press, if we print right to the edge of a sheet, ink will migrate past the edges of sheet and will smudge the reverse side of the sheet. The second and perhaps the most important reason has to do with the mechanical nature of the trimming process. If the image is printed exact size on a larger sheet, and then trim the sheet to size, sheets would trim a hair high, low, left or right inconsistently through the stack of sheets. We would see random and unintended small white (unprinted) areas around the edges of the sheets. This is because mechanical tolerances of industrial paper cutters are not high enough to print exactly where the image ends, and environmental factors will randomly change the size of of sheets in the stack while they’re drying prior to final trim.

So, what’s that “unsafe area” in the graphic? For the same reasons that we print larger than final size, It’s a good idea to keep any important design elements such as type away from the area between the blue and pink boxes, so they don’t get partly trimmed off in the final trimming process.

As always it’s recommended that if you’re designing business cards or any printed material, consult with your priting professional before starting the design process.

To get more information or an estimate, please visit our Business Card Printing page.