Printing and design company in Auckland New Zealand

Check out these guys - DESIGN & PRINT ETC LIMITED, SILVERDALE AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND. an interesting model. Not only do they print and provide Web and design services, but also the full gamete of promotional goods including uniforms (T-shirts etc) mugs and glassware and a whole load of other promo stuff.

Tips for finding a good printing company

If you are going to look at printing companies there are some qualities that we need to consider. First is the quality of their services and work.

Sometimes, we conceit ourselves to produce the best there is in the field of printing. You will benefit from dealing with a printing company who has long been on top of the industry and among those printing companies who are offering the same printing services.

Now, these printing services will surely do their best and will guarantee the work that has been handed to them. Now choose a printing company that can print it correctly with the standards of printing.

If you are not satisfied with the results, a good printing company should do some actions especially if there are mistakes, which they have caused.

If you want to order for their services, ask them first if they can guarantee to offer you full service and workmanship.

You need to research and compare the prices of the products. We know that not all printing companies have the same charges with the services. This one factor determines a company from the others.

Some printing companies charge high prices, which is not good for bulk orders. In choosing a printing company, one factor you need to consider is the pricing and the quality. Try to see if they are able to run the type of job that you want.

This should not only be done on a well-maintained press but they should also have an appropriate size for the type of Printing Press, which is suitable for your exclusive requirements.

You can always find a good printing company that can provide you with the right press for the type of work all the time. There are also other printing companies that will offer a niche, which is based on a singular press size.

Printing companies can give you a quote and even run your printing on the largest web presses up to the smallest printing press size in order to have optimal printing press that is efficient.

Some printing companies may charge you a price, which is above the natural price. You should watch out for these companies. They can sometimes recognize whether you are still new into the business field. There are always good printing companies that can offer money saving tips in choosing their services.

Those are the ones you should look out for.

(Roto)Gravure printing - what is it?

Rotogravure (roto or gravure for short) is a type of intaglio printing process, in that it involves engraving the image onto an image carrier. In gravure printing, the image is engraved onto a copper cylinder because, like offset and flexography, it uses a rotary printing press.

The vast majority of gravure presses print on reels of paper, rather than sheets of paper. (Sheetfed gravure is a small, specialty market.) Rotary gravure presses are the fastest and widest presses in operation, printing everything from narrow labels to 12 feet (4 m)-wide rolls of vinyl flooring.

Additional operations may be in-line with a gravure press, such as saddle stitching facilities for magazine/brochure work. Once a staple of newspaper photo features, the rotogravure process is still used for commercial printing of magazines, postcards, and corrugated (cardboard) product packaging.

History and development

In the latter quarter of the 19th century, the method of image photo transfer onto carbon tissue covered with light-sensitive gelatin was discovered and was the beginning of rotogravure. In the 1930s–1960s, newspapers published relatively few photographs and instead many newspapers published separate rotogravure sections in their Sunday editions. These sections were devoted to photographs and identifying captions, not news stories.

Irving Berlin's song Easter Parade specifically refers to these sections in the lines "the photographers will stop us, and you'll appear for sure in the rotogravure."

In 1932 a George Gallup "Survey of Reader Interest in Various Sections of Sunday Newspapers to Determine the Relative Value of Rotogravure as an Advertising Medium" found that these special rotogravures were the most widely read sections of the paper and that advertisements there were three times more likely to be seen by readers than in any other section.

FOIL PRINTING -what is it?

Foil stamping, typically a commercial print process, is the application of pigment or metallic foil, often gold or silver , but can also be various patterns or what is known as pastel foil which is a flat opaque color or white special film-backed material, to paper where a heated die is stamped onto the foil, making it adhere to the surface leaving the design of the die on the paper. Foil stamping can be combined with embossing to create a more striking 3D image.

Description

Foil stamping machines, also known as hot foil stampers, use heat to transfer metallic foil to a solid surface. Examples of items that are foil stamped include pencils, napkins, matchbooks, photographs and books. The foil stamp is a permanent process. These machines are popular with wedding businesses, photography studios and other businesses that need to brand or mark products.

A similar machine, called a foil fuser, creates a similar look in a process called foil fusing in which foil is fused to printer toner by means of heat.

Types

There are two primary types of foil stamping machines. The first type is manual and the second is pneumatic (air powered). Manual foil stampers are ideal for low to medium volume jobs and the pneumatic is idea for medium to high-volume jobs.

Safety

Foil stampers do create a lot of heat in order to transfer the foil to the surface of an object. Safety must be observed when changing type sets to prevent one from being burned.

SCREEN PRINTING - what is it?

Screen printing first appeared in a recognizable form in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD). ^[4][5] Japan and other Asian countries adopted this method of printing and advanced the craft using it in conjunction with block printing and hand applied paints.

Screen printing was largely introduced to Western Europe from Asia sometime in the late 1700s, but did not gain large acceptance or use in Europe until silk mesh was more available for trade from the east and a profitable outlet for the medium discovered.

Screen printing was first patented in England by Samuel Simon in 1907.^[6][7][8] It was originally used as a popular method to print expensive wall paper, printed on linen, silk, and other fine fabrics. Western screen printers developed reclusive, defensive and exclusionary business policies intended to keep secret their workshops' knowledge and techniques.^[9]

Early in the 1910s, several printers experimenting with photo-reactive chemicals used the well-known actinic light activated cross linking or hardening traits of potassium, sodium or ammonium Chromate and dichromate chemicals with glues and gelatin compounds. Roy Beck, Charles Peter and Edward Owens studied and experimented with chromic acid salt sensitized emulsions for photo-reactive stencils. This trio of developers would prove to revolutionize the commercial screen printing industry by introducing photo-imaged stencils to the industry, though the acceptance of this method would take many years. Commercial screen printing now uses sensitizers far safer and less toxic than bichromates. Currently there are large selections of pre-sensitized and "user mixed" sensitized emulsion chemicals for creating photo-reactive stencils.^[9]

Joseph Ulano founded the industry chemical supplier Ulano and in 1928 created a method of applying a lacquer soluble stencil material to a removable base. This stencil material was cut into shapes, the print areas removed and the remaining material adhered to mesh to create a sharp edged screen stencil. ^[10]

Originally a profitable industrial technology, screen printing was eventually adopted by artists as an expressive and conveniently repeatable medium for duplication well before the 1900s. It is currently popular both in fine arts and in commercial printing, where it is commonly used to print images on Posters, T-shirts, hats, CDs, DVDs, ceramics, glass, polyethylene, polypropylene, paper, metals, and wood.

A group of artists who later formed the National Serigraphic Society coined the word Serigraphy in the 1930s to differentiate the artistic application of screen printing from the industrial use of the process.^[11] "Serigraphy" is a combination word from the Latin word "Seri" (silk) and the Greek word "graphein" (to write or draw).^[12]

The Printer's National Environmental Assistance Center says "Screenprinting is arguably the most versatile of all printing processes."^[13] Since rudimentary screenprinting materials are so affordable and readily available, it has been used frequently in underground settings and subcultures, and the non-professional look of such DIY culture screenprints have become a significant cultural aesthetic seen on movie posters, record album covers, flyers, shirts, commercial fonts in advertising, in artwork and elsewhere.

A screen is made of a piece of porous, finely woven fabric called mesh stretched over a frame of aluminum or wood. Originally human hair then silk was woven into screen mesh; currently most mesh is made of man-made materials such as steel, nylon, and polyester. Areas of the screen are blocked off with a non-permeable material to form a stencil, which is a negative of the image to be printed; that is, the open spaces are where the ink will appear.

The screen is placed atop a substrate such as paper or fabric. Ink is placed on top of the screen, and a fill bar (also known as a floodbar) is used to fill the mesh openings with ink. The operator begins with the fill bar at the rear of the screen and behind a reservoir of ink. The operator lifts the screen to prevent contact with the substrate and then using a slight amount of downward force pulls the fill bar to the front of the screen. This effectively fills the mesh openings with ink and moves the ink reservoir to the front of the screen. The operator then uses a squeegee (rubber blade) to move the mesh down to the substrate and pushes the squeegee to the rear of the screen. The ink that is in the mesh opening is pumped or squeezed by capillary action to the substrate in a controlled and prescribed amount, i.e. the wet ink deposit is equal to the thickness of the mesh and or stencil. As the squeegee moves toward the rear of the screen the tension of the mesh pulls the mesh up away from the substrate (called snap-off) leaving the ink upon the substrate surface.

There are three common types of screenprinting presses. The 'flat-bed', 'cylinder', and the most widely used type, the 'rotary'.^[13]

Textile items printed with multi-colour designs often a wet on wet technique or colors dried while on the press, while graphic items are allowed to dry between colours that are then printed with another screen and often in a different color after the product is re-aligned on the press.

The screen can be re-used after cleaning. However if the design is no longer needed, then the screen can be "reclaimed", that is cleared of all emulsion and used again. The reclaiming process involves removing the ink from the screen then spraying on stencil remover to remove all emulsion. Stencil removers come in the form of liquids, gels, or powders. The powdered types have to be mixed with water before use, and so can be considered to belong to the liquid category. After applying the stencil remover the emulsion must be washed out using a pressure washer.

Most screens are ready for recoating at this stage, but sometimes screens will have to undergo a further step in the reclaiming process called dehazing. This additional step removes haze or "ghost images" left behind in the screen once the emulsion has been removed. Ghost images tend to faintly outline the open areas of previous stencils, hence the name. They are the result of ink residue trapped in the mesh, often in the knuckles of the mesh, those points where threads overlap. ^[18]

While the public thinks of garments in conjunction with screenprinting, the technique is used on tens of thousands of items, decals, clock and watch faces, balloons and many more products. The technique has even been adapted for more advanced uses, such as laying down conductors and resistors in multi-layer circuits using thin ceramic layers as the substrate.

DIGITAL PRINTING - what is it?

Digital printing accounts for approximately 9% of the 45 trillion pages printed annually (2005 figure) around the world.

Printing at home or in an office or engineering environment is subdivided into:

• small format (up to ledger size paper sheets), as used in business offices and libraries
• wide format (up to 3' or 914mm wide rolls of paper), as used in drafting and design establishments.

Some of the more common printing technologies are:

• blueprint—and related chemical technologies.
• daisy wheel—where pre-formed characters are applied individually.
• dot-matrix—which produces arbitrary patterns of dots with an array of printing studs.
• line printing—where pre-formed characters are applied to the paper by lines.
• heat transfer—like early fax machines or modern receipt printers that apply heat to special paper, which turns black to form the printed image.
• inkjet—including bubble-jet—where ink is sprayed onto the paper to create the desired image.
• xerography—where toner is attracted to a charged image and then developed.
• laser—a type of xerography where the charged image is written pixel by pixel by a laser.
• solid ink printer—where cubes of ink are melted to make ink or liquid toner.

Vendors typically stress the total cost to operate the equipment, involving complex calculations that include all cost factors involved in the operation as well as the capital equipment costs, amortization, etc. For the most part, toner systems beat inkjet in the long run, whereas inkjets are less expensive in the initial purchase price.

Professional digital printing (using toner) primarily uses an electrical charge to transfer toner or liquid ink to the substrate it is printed on. Digital print quality has steadily improved from early color and black & white copiers to sophisticated colour digital presses like the Xerox iGen3, the Kodak Nexpress, the HP Indigo Digital Press series and the InfoPrint 5000. The iGen3 and Nexpress use toner particles and the Indigo uses liquid ink. The InfoPrint 5000 is a full-color, continuous forms inkjet drop-on-demand printing system. All handle variable data and rival offset in quality. Digital offset presses are also called direct imaging presses, although these presses can receive computer files and automatically turn them into print-ready plates, they cannot insert variable data.

Small press and fanzines generally use digital printing. Prior to the introduction of cheap photocopying the use of machines such as the spirit duplicator, hectograph, and mimeograph was common.

OFFSET PRINTING... What is it?

Offset printing is a widely used printing technique where the inked image is transferred (or "offset") from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface. When used in combination with the lithographic process, which is based on the repulsion of oil and water, the offset technique employs a flat (planographic) image carrier on which the image to be printed obtains ink from ink rollers, while the non-printing area attracts a film of water, keeping the non-printing areas ink-free.

Currently, most books and newspapers are printed using the technique of offset lithography. Other common techniques include:

• flexography used for packaging, labels, newspapers.
• hot wax dye transfer
• inkjet used typically to print a small number of books or packaging, and also to print a variety of materials from high quality papers simulate offset printing, to floor tiles; Inkjet is also used to apply mailing addresses to direct mail pieces.
• laser printing mainly used in offices and for transactional printing (bills, bank documents). Laser printing is commonly used by direct mail companies to create variable data letters or coupons, for example.
• pad printing popular for its unique ability to print on complex 3-dimensional surfaces.
• relief print, (mainly used for catalogues).
• rotogravure mainly used for magazines and packaging.
• screen-printing from T-shirts to floor tiles.