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Leaflet Printing
With prices from £26 and 5000 A5 double sided full colour leafets from £99 1ClickPrint can provide high quality prints at a price that suits. We have no hidden extras and our delivery is even free to the mainland UK. We have years of in depth leaflet printing experience under our belts and now is a great time to take advantage of our great prices. These aren't special offers, these aren't short term promotional prices. These are prices are here for the long term and our large regular customer base to testify to that.
Leaflet printing generally comes in two flavours. Digital and offset (sometimes called litho) printing. Digital leafets are produced on a large laser printer and as such are fantastically cheap in small quantities but become gradually more expensive in respect to offset printed leaflet at higher volumes. At about 1000 copies offset printed leaflets equal laser printed leaflets in price. In addition to this laser printed leaflets tend to be of marginally lower print quality but paper optimised for digital printing will generally feel thicker than that meant for offset printing even at the same weight. Laser prints tend to offer a less consistancy in solid colours and printing an exact pantone colour isn't really a viable option as the prints are formed by overlaying several different coloured prints rather than pritning using a purpose mixed ink. In conclusion leaflet printing using digital technology is fine for very small quantities but generally can't stand up to the quality offered by offset printing.
Offset printing uses the large print machinery that most people think of when they hear the words printing press. An offset press requires a printing plate for every primary colour used. Usually this is four with one for each of the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black) used to make up the range of colours available. The printing plate is attached to a circular drum ink is transfered to a printing plate by using the lithographic process hence the alternate name litho press. Basically its been well know for thousands of years that moisture will stick to some things and not others such as wax. The printing plate has a wax like substance where ever there is no ink on the image so that when the printing plate presses against a rubber drum the image is transferred (technically called offset hence the name of the press) across to it. This rubber drum, also known as the offset drum, then presses against the paper and produces the final print. To create a full colour image four of these printing heads are pretty much just bolted together in a line to repeat the exact same process for all four of the primary used in process leaflet printing. Using this process a fifth head can be added to over print a pantone colour. Usually this is referred to as 4+1 printing and is often used for company logo or colour schemes.
No matter the print method all leaflet printing has to be chopped down from the large sheets used to the individual leaflets. This is generally accomplished on a large industrial guillotine. These quite dangerous beasts are capable of exerting massive forces through their chopping blades are will make very short work of anything that's put in there. Even though these monsters are so powerful they are also precision instruments and capable of slicing large reams of paper with reasonable accuracy. Unfortunately there are several factors than can mean that things don't line up exactly, especially on double sided prints. This means that every print needs a bleed. A bleed is an area of your design that extends over and above the size of your intended dimensions. Basically an area of paper that you don't mind keeping and you don't mind losing. This allows the machinery to work to the industry standard of 3mm variation in postioning and still maintain a great finished product. If the bleed can be best described as the area outside of your design that you don't mind keeping then there must also be an area inside of your print that you don't mind losing. Tollerances are quoted as +- 3mm and which means that if the print is 3 mm to the left you will not only expose 3mm of bleed but also lose 3mm of your design on the right. The area of your design excluding the external bleed and also the internal bleed is often called the safe zone. You can be sure that anything printed in this safe zone will be printed but anything outside of it may be lost. It's generally considered good practise to create design that won't highlight any wandering of the print positioning. An extreme example would be a white box covering the entire safe zone surrounded by a black background in the bleed area. In a normal print run some of the prints will be centred perfectly whilst some will be up to 3mm of in one direction. This could mean that the design is cropped to the very edge of the white box on one edge and showing 6mm of black background on the oposite edge. This is obvioulsy very different to the original centred box that the designer envisaged.
