Free Cutter Guides!

I'm starting to publish cutter guides FREE on my website, www.prod-ctr.co.uk. These are all for use entirely at your own risk, and I strongly recommend making a dummy before you do anything else. This guide is a very handy one for a 2-bay leaflet dispenser - to hold A5 leaflets and credit-card size cards or leaflets (85x55mm). Ideal for low-attendance trade counters, etc. It requires one glueing. If you need any guidance on how to make it up, or quotes for printing/finishing this dispenser (I have a cutter so I should be cheaper than anyone else), please contact me. Also if you need the guide adjusting for your own needs, I can do it for a small fee. This picture shows the dispenser made up, and the guide - this is available as a vector pdf on my website.

Printing on Recycled Papers

Using recycled paper is a major consideration for many clients and designers. As a general rule, the more recycled the paper is, the less white it will be. However, some paper companies have recently introduced ranges which offer much better whiteness in their uncoated papers - for example Revive 100 and Cocoon (both 100% FSC-certified post-consumer recycled papers). These papers are whitened on their surface with natural additives, which works well on the uncoated papers, but doesn't work on coated papers. So the gloss coated version of Revive 100 is much greyer than the uncoated version.

Uncoated papers generally go down very well with the consumer - they can feel right away that it is something different, and it can help to create a warm ambience and a positive reception for your brand or message. The downsides are 

1) although they take colour well, they won't have the colour 'lift' that you would expect from a coated paper. So if your message is colour-critical, it's better to go with a coated paper, and maybe switch to a 50% recycled version (eg. Revive 50:50) to get good whiteness in the paper.

2) drying times can be long on the uncoated versions, especially if you have large areas of solid colour. Because the paper soaks up ink, it can be necessary to put a lot of ink down during printing, in order to get the colour up to the strength you want. This can then take a long time to dry - days or even weeks! So it's definitely best to avoid large areas of solid colour if you want to use these papers. If production time is critical, use a coated version.

Miniature boxes using digital print

I recently produced a job for a customer who wanted to create a 'pill box' at minimal cost. We digitally printed the boxes on a cast-coated board, which gave a fantastic printed result, then die-cut and made them up. The end result was a mailing with real 'wow', and a very happy customer. The pictures show the size of the box and the guide. If you need any cutter guides, or ideas for mailings, see my website www.prod-ctr.co.uk.

Free-standing totem - improving rigidity to enable customer interaction

A client just sought my advice on a problem he has - he is producing an oval cross-section free-standing totem in board, and several hundred of these need to be strong enough, and stable enough, to enable customers to use a sliding feature on the front of them. 

The problem is that the totem, which is 1700mm high by 400mm wide, is made out of 600micron boxboard. When made into an oval-section totem, this is quite stable enough and rigid enough to stand alone as a display. But if customers are going to start playing with a device on the front of it, it needs to be much more rigid and stable. Plus the sliding device itself needs to be very robust to cope with being handled thousands of times.

Due to time and budget restraints, it's not possible to get any mouldings made, for the totem or the slider. So my recommendations were:

1. Beef up the totem with a B-flute corrugated inner.
2. Extend the feet considerably, using an X-format to splay the feet out away from the front of the totem
3. Include side pieces on the feet - this will improve the stability more, and will keep people further away from the totem, reducing tripping etc.
4. For the slider, make this out of 800micron polypropylene, so it can form a tab-interlocking box, which will tab on to the front of the totem. This can be litho printed directly, or maybe have laminated stickers applied to it.

Here's my sketches of these suggestions. And heres also a pic of a similar oval section totem I've done before - sorry about my knees. If you have a similar problem, email me at angus@prod-ctr.co.uk or see my website www.prod-ctr.co.uk

 

Printing business cards on the OKI9650

The Oki 9650 is a good machine for business cards, as it can handle up to 350gsm board. Other machines such as the Xante Illumina are based on the same Oki engine, and have supposedly been tweaked to handle even thicker boards, but these are widely perceived to cause reliability problems. So best to stick with the Oki and the 350gsm. The best paper I've found for business cards is Conqueror CX22 350gsm. This is a very high bulk, high stiffness, and high smoothness board, but it will still go through the printer easily and takes toner well. It's very expensive though, so don't waste any!

On very thick boards, the printer has some trouble holding registration on parts of the sheet. If you run an SRA3 (320x450) sheet through, it tends to hold register at the grip end and the back end, and lose it in the middle. The solution is to cut the SRA3 sheet down to 320x150mm - that way it holds register pretty well for all of the sheet. This should still be loaded with the 320mm edge forward - set up the sheet in the printer driver as 320 wide x 150 long. And test it first before you chop up too much paper!

See the feed direction in the pic - the printer is under the pile of boxes! For more info on digital print & other techniques see my website www.prod-ctr.co.uk.

graphic formula turned into 3D signs in 2 days

1st July 2009

Just completed an interesting display job for a major healthcare company. They wanted a graphic formula made into a 3-dimensional sign for their offices. The 'formula' consisted of 12 pieces, about 400mm wide in total, and they wanted it to appear to 'float' in the air.

Solution: we had the pieces laser-cut out of 18mm MDF. We laser-printed the graphics onto self-adhesive pvc, then cut them out and wrapped the MDF pieces in them. The smallest pieces (+ and =), which were only 12mm across, were hand painted. All elements were then glued to clear acylic backboards. All completed in 2 days. for more information see www.prod-ctr.co.uk