Businesses of all sizes need professional design and printing services. Whether a small business or a large corporation, the quality that comes with commercial printing can give your company’s image the boost that it needs to rise above your competition and to make an impression on your customers.
Whether you need a quantity of 100 or 100,000, commercial printing can be expensive, but working with knowledgeable and customer service oriented graphic design firms and printers can definitely help you reduce costs. Here are the top 5 ways to save money on your business printing.
1. Proof, Proof, Proof
Having a typo or a poor color choice in your final product can be unsightly to put out and costly to replace. Proofing your materials with multiple employees before sending the material to the copy company is one way to ensure that you won’t have to pay double or risk putting out a less than professional piece of material. This goes for artwork as well as writing: be sure that your artwork is in the proper format for printing before giving it to your printer.
Your graphic designer should have a “pre-flight” checklist for the project and should check all fonts, images, colors, and transparency issues before sending any artwork to the printer. Make sure your final artwork is “print ready” – otherwise your printer may need to send it back to you for corrections or, worse, not catch the error and leave you with a potentially expensive mess of unusable material.
2. Consider Your Paper
Paper and ink are the two most expensive elements. Considering various ways to cut down on paper costs can cut down on the end cost of a project immeasurably.
Consider printing on a lighter weight of paper. Unless the paper weight will affect the look and feel wanted for the piece , you can save money by switching to a lighter paper stock. In addition, don’t be afraid to ask your printer for paper stock suggestions. Many printers have particular paper stocks that they use.
Using your printer’s default paper stock, rather than a custom paper stock, can save you time and money.
3. Save Ink Wherever Possible
There are several ways to make considerable ink savings without sacrificing professionalism or style.
First off, keep solid ink coverage to a minimum in the design. The more ink a project needs, the more it may cost to print.
Secondly, don’t use bleeds in your artwork. A ‘bleed’ is when the ink or printing goes all the way to one or more of the edges of the paper, and it is both ink-expensive and more difficult to do.
Finally, consider keeping your number of colors to a minimum. The more colors you have in your finished design, the more ink will have to be used to mix those colors, becoming very expensive very quickly.
4. Use Online Printing Services
Due to lower overhead, online printing services such as Solo Printing are often less expensive than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. In addition, being able to upload your designs as-is will give you a maximum amount of control over your final product.
5. Consider Bulk Ordering
If you think you might need more of the printed piece in the future, consider having more printed now. Offset printing prices per piece go down as the overall quantity goes up. It will more than likely be cheaper to print a larger quantity now than it will be to print 2 or more shorter quantity runs.