Even if you are in finance, or marketing, or product development, it is still important to have a strong sense of how your printing materials are being made. The more you know about printing, the more you can offer input to other teams within your company. Being able to know about different parts of the marketing and production process is important, especially if you are a small business. If you are uninitiated to the world and ways of printing jackets, offset printing or advanced printing press systems in general, fear not. You can start by learning some of the basics that separate standard graphic printing from truly standout graphic printing press techniques. And once you get the hang of these techniques, you can be more informed and confident when you get to buying offset printing supplies for your business.
The offset printing process requires a few pieces of sophisticated equipment in order to fully render the best graphics and products possible. First, you will need a healthy supply of cylinder jackets in order to have the ability to create graphics with advanced angle tolerance and clean edge bending. These jackets are the buffer between the offset printing press and the actual surface you are printing on. In order to transfer properly, the offset printer grafts its surface flexibly to the contours of the template, transferring the personality and edges of the print in a way that would be impossible with a standard printing press. Furthermore, the two-step process, from template to blanket, from blanket to surface, allows for more naturally-occurring variations to present themselves in the finished product. These variations are not necessarily mistakes – but rather, signatures of the printing process that are not unlike the happy accidents you find on screen-printed paintings (a la Andy Warhol).
A Hyper-Sensitive Way to Print – Offset Printing Supplies
The basics of offset printing are as follows: moving or transferring an inked image from a plate (or template) to a rubber blanket, also known as an offset printing blanket, and then finally onto the printed surface. With a healthy supply of cylinder jackets, you can safely do many offset printing jobs without worrying about the ink transferring the ink onto the press. This flexibility to do multiple jobs is going to be key if you want to use your printing press long-term. This flexibility is also crucial for another key to the artistic printing process: experimentation. You may find that the final prints look different in reality than they do in theory. If you experiment with different chemicals and inks, or colors, or even amounts of time during the process (between pressing from one surface to another) you will get different results that you may love.
Offset printing supplies can be difficult to understand as a beginner or an outsider to the graphic printing process. Thankfully though, there are plenty of printing supplies companies that can help you figure out the ins and outs of the printing process. If you contact one, you could recoup some value that you don’t expect to get, in the form of tips and tricks to cost-effectively build a graphic identity through sophisticated applications of offset printing materials. If you have plenty of supplies to work with, you can experiment with them in order to find the perfect pop on your finished printing products.
