Foam Boards

We are an In-Plant, we don't get to do truly interesting stuff very often.

Today we did something interesting..... we cut some foam boards.

Logo's print on Photo-gloss paper at about 30 inches tall each. Spray mounted onto 3/16 inch foam boards and then cut by hand to the final shape.

Printing was about 4 hours total. Mounting and cutting about one more hour.

Line by Line

I guess I'll keep with a theme and share another Letter Press story, this time about Jerry Richardson in Fargo North Dakota...

Jerry Richardson is a man of letters – many, many letters. 

Talk to the 82-year-old and you’ll likely get a carefully considered, concise response delivered in a low, quiet, even tone. 

While not known for his prose, he is well respected for his visual presentations of words in print. 

In the basement of his Ninth Street home in Fargo, Richardson runs two letterpresses, producing some of the finest textual prints in the region, from individual literary lines to limited edition books and broadsides. 

To paraphrase a great orator, Teddy Roosevelt, “Speak softly and carry a big pica pole.”

One of the printing presses in Richardson’s basement weighs about 2,000 pounds. Each piece of paper that is printed on is placed by hand. Dave Wallis / The Forum
Read the entire article here: http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/374709/

Old becomes new again....

Everything old becomes new again.... not sure I have the cliche exactly correct even if the idea is appropriate.

http://www.vernonmorningstar.com/entertainment/168205986.html


In a small town in Canada, at the Okanagan College, a new project called 'The Bunker' is opening soon.

What makes The Bunker so special? It is a Letter Press shop that is going to teach students how to set type by hand and print with ink on paper. And when I say ink I mean the kind that gets under your fingernails and stains your fingertips like your Father and Grandfather used in their shops.

I am very excited to see a program like this opening even if it is in Canada, and therefore very far away from here, because this is how I got my start in printing. I have a huge appreciation for modern typesetting and layout programs because I know what it used to be like. And I truly appreciate the irony of early in my career being 'rushed' to manually typeset a newsletter in several days to now being 'rushed' to typeset the same newsletter in an hour or less. As the technology improves so do the expectations placed upon the technology.

Anyway... click the link above and admire some beautiful equipment and enjoy the glimpse back to the print shops of the 50's and 60's.

Printing versus D.I.Y.

Economic Times are tough all over. Pennies have to be watched, belts have to be tightened, basically everything needs some attention.

Paper is a good opportunity to save money. Print everything two sided and reduce the amount of paper you use. This is just a good idea anyway, reduce the amount of physical space your archives will consume, lighten the load when moving those archives, both of which reduce the total carbon footprint of your operations.

However,the actual money savings are slight when you figure the cost of a sheet of paper is somewhere around a penny. It takes a lot of pennies to make a difference. So if your printing two sides to save money immediately, you aren't really saving any money immediately. You should keep saving those pennies, but with the understanding that they are only pennies.

Let me give you another example of a money saving idea that doesn't really save any money: Envelopes.

Envelopes should be the easiest thing in the world, order a rubber stamp or print some labels, stamp or stick, and away you go! Easy as pie!

But did you save any money?

A box of envelopes from the local office supply is about $9. And that is for the most basic of envelopes.

If you want to go with a rubber stamp, you can get an a typical address stamp for about $15. And a stamp at that price point should last you between 3 and 5 thousand impressions.

Now, how fast can you stamp a box of 500 envelopes? And what is that time worth to you? What could you be doing, what should you be doing, instead of stamping a box of 500 envelopes?

Keeping up with me so far? Your envelopes have cost roughly $19 a box if you count two cents per stamp to cover your time and the initial cost of the stamp.


Oh, there is a quality issue as well. Your $15 dollar rubber stamp is going to print kind of like this:

And the longer you use the stamp, the more it will fade and then you start hitting it harder which shortens the life span even further..... you get the idea.

That life span of the rubber stamp I mentioned above, between three and five thousand impressions, a case of envelopes is 2,500, or five boxes of 500. That means you will be lucky to get two cases of envelopes stamped from one rubber stamp. How many boxes of envelopes do you use in a year?

The alternative?

The Copy Center!

This is our blog, did you not see that one coming?

Envelopes can be printed for $25 per box, or if you have room to store them you can get a case for $100, or $20 per box.

And we have specialized machines for envelopes that can print as many as 2,500 envelopes an hour. That is a case of envelopes in an hour. And all it takes you is the time to send us a work order. A few minutes of your valuable time and you get a professional presentation that looks something like this:

Clean, neat, professional looking, everything an envelope from the City of Hollywood should be.

Lets recap:

Crappy rubber stamp impression on an envelope - $19 ish dollars for a box.

Professionally printed envelopes from the Copy Center - as low as $20 per box.

Any questions?