Tag: educational

In the UK, every worker uses up the equivalent of 4.48 trees per year.

Since 1980 (-2012) global paper consumption increased by half.

Get more for your budget!

“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food”, the glorious Douglas Adams said this back in 2001. Yes, I am a lover of print but as a visual artist, I am also a lover of the content, and how it’s compiled on the page/plate. The format of what we print is important. How it’s graphically designed, AND how it’s reproduced can add value (BPIF Stats).

What I am highlighting here is that print costs to a large organisation can be significant. If we think about how our print is reproduced we could save thousands of pounds.

It may seem like common sense, but as Voltaire, pointed out ‘common sense is often rare’. In a large organisation, if we all just printed a tad more thoughtfully, we could save thousands over a year.

Let’s serve it up thoughtfully!

Ask for it in Black and White (Mono). 

Printing in colour costs 10 times that of printing in black.

If 100 colour clicks = £10, 100 mono clicks is less than £1. (plus the cost of paper etc)

Put it another way, you can print many times more in mono, as you might in colour!

Is colour on your page necessary? If you have a colour document with a mono page, copier machines can sense that and charge that page as mono, if there’s one small sentence in pink on that page it will charge 10 times as much and print the page in colour. 

Where possible reduce your use of colour for printing.

If you need bling, then mono print on coloured paper is still cheaper than colour print.

In short, print in mono if colour is not necessary.

Print back to back, or smaller, and half your paper costs!

If you print back to back it can use half the paper of single-sided printing.

Printing your page as A5 or A6 can reduce paper and print costs even further! Just ask for it as A5 or A6.

Reduce paper AND print costs…

Quarter your paper costs and minimise your print cost!

We can easily convert your A4 multiple paged document into an A5 stapled booklet.
If you print as an A5 booklet, four pages become one sheet of two sides.

An A5 mono booklet could use a quarter of the paper and a twentieth of the print cost, compared to an A4 colour single-sided booklet.

In short, it’s not always possible but try and think about costs.

Where possible make it mono, and seek to use paper economically.

Printing your page as A5 (two per A4) or even A6 (four per sheet) can reduce paper and print costs even further! For example, print Powerpont docs as multiple slides per page where possible.

There is software that is designed to aid economical print reproduction. We recommend using this where appropriate. Think about batch printing, we can do this for you:
Save money, paper and time…

*Any prices shown are just for illustration.

Splitting a PDF landscape single double-page spread into two portrait pages??

OK this is dull and not relevant unless it’s relevant, but it’s a solution to a problem that once explained is easy; I should have sorted it way before I did!

Every now and then I’m sent a PDF for folded booklet printing, that has been created as single page double-page spreads.

This is no good if a printed folded “booklet” is required. It’s been created for viewing on-screen, not imposed for print production. There is no automatic way to print this as a folded booklet as the page/s need to be chopped in half.

There is a relatively easy workaround solution, which involves digitally cropping the pages. 

1. Create a duplicate of the PDF file.
2. Open the original file in Acrobat Pro.
3. Insert the duplicate file at the end: Right-click “Insert,” select “from file”. Select the duplicate file, insert “after”.
4. Place/move the pages that need cropping into their correct orders, such that you have two in a row for each page (1,1, 2, 2, 3, 3,…)
5. Select a page to crop and right-click the thumbnail “Crop pages”
   
6. On the first page to be cropped, select the left-hand side of the image, by making the right margin half the width. 148mm for half 297mm (Show the ‘Crop Box’)
7. Set page range for the pages you want to crop, “Apply to” to the “even pages”
8. Go to the next page to be cropped. This time select the right-hand side of the page, by making the left margin half the width. 
9. Set page range to “All,” and “apply to” to “odd pages”

This leaves you with single paged PDF that can be printed as a stitched folded booklet if you have a booklet printer/finisher.

Reprographics – there’s always a way…

Yes, I’m busy with the new school reprographics job but also with more creative material – I’ve been creating large wall-collage compositions.

The large format print and signmakers ‘Digital Deadline’ in Melton have been supplying a variety of quality new material this year. One of their specialities is producing and installing large-format wall coverings.

Digital Deadline’s clients across the East Midlands, provide them with variously themed briefs, and I have recently been creating the print-ready visual artwork for them.

Here below are just a few recent wall-collage compositions I’ve completed for Digital Deadline for some local primary school installations – the walls are roughly 5-7mtr x 32-3mtr and have doors windows and radiator spaces in, hence the plain patches. When they are installed they really are effective. The team at Digital Deadline do a great job and I’m looking forward to seeing finished installation shots in due course. 

Two joined walls for a Primary School RE room.

The opposing two joined walls for a Primary School RE room

2016 – Large Format Prints

Four walls for a Primary School History/Media/Comms.

If you can envisage similar in your workplace, venue, community space or even home, just give Digital Deadline a shout!