Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I've been doing commercial printing for about fifteen years as a designer. And, people would
always try to sell me on the idea of using an Indigo, and I had seen sort of the Indigo
prints from about 10 years ago. So, my idea of what digital printing was is completely
different than my opinion now. So about three years ago I had to start doing a variety of
projects that were from around the world, so we were printing 32 versions in 32 languages
of projects, so we had 32 different printers printing them all conventionally. I had a
salesperson from HP come to me and suggest the idea of printing them digitally. They
printed some samples for me and my whole view of digital printing changed, because the quality
of digital printing now is just as good as something that is printed conventionally.
And then we were able to create one design and have it flow in the 32 different languages
within the design, and as far as the quote for the printing, it was printed as one million.
So, instead of doing 32 batches of, let's say, 25,000 or 10,000 or 5,000, we were able
to sort of bid it out as one million and then get the pricing discount of a million prints
but we still did 32 versions because all the variable data was flowed in right on the Indigo
press. One of the things I love about digital printing is, well first of all, turnaround
time. The ability for them to create a proof for me is so much faster with digital. The
fact that it can swap out PMS colors on the fly very quickly, so I'm able to sort of use
all the colors I want to on a conventional press - it can mimic, you know, all of them.
But to me, the great benefit is how fast I can actually see one of my designs sort of
come to me from a proofing standpoint. With this entire piece, because it was digitally
printed, it was everything I wanted in a piece and it all came in under budget. So that's
like the beauty of printing on something like an Indigo. I get everything I want, and I
can keep it within the budget, which makes everyone happy - makes the client happy, it
makes me happy.