BlaBlaPrint: prefabricated print runs - a way to save money

Suppose you need to get from point A to point B by car and you want to save money. What's the best way? Of course, take travel companions. At the same time, it won’t be so boring along the way. It sounds unusual, but it also works in printing! Cooperation with other customers helps to significantly reduce the cost of order production. Not every printing house offers prefabricated editions. Therefore, you should not neglect this opportunity.

What is this?

By prefabricated circulation in printing we mean a method printing, when several projects are placed on the same printed sheet. This reduces costs and paper waste. As a rule, this is used if the printing house has a large-format offset printing press.

Why is this beneficial?

There are several important cost items in printing that are reflected in the cost per print. When agreeing to a prefabricated edition, it is worth understanding the features of this offset technology.

In offset printing, the image is transferred from the printing plate to the sheet through an intermediate offset cylinder. The color layout is divided into color components - cyan, magenta, yellow, black (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK - CMYK), for printing with cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, respectively. These four colors are enough to get any desired color. Each paint has its own printing plate.

Making these printing plates requires a number of consumables. And if you need high-quality printing, the printing house uses expensive materials. And no matter how many orders there are on one sheet, the number of printing plates will not change, it will depend only on the number of inks.

Before printing starts, the so-called “makeready” is carried out - setting up the equipment in order to achieve an accurate combination of inks, warm up and roll out the rollers and mechanisms of the printing machine, achieve a uniform supply of inks, and achieve the exact color.

In simple words, the printer must make sure that everything is applied accurately and correctly, and the colors correspond to the desired ones. Adjustment takes time and from several dozen to several hundred printed sheets.

When printing yourself, all costs will fall entirely on your shoulders. And with a prefabricated print run, the costs are divided evenly between customers.

It is also worth considering the fact that the lion's share of the cost of printing is on paper. If you need a small-format product, and the printing press is large-format, then a significant part of the paper sheet will go to waste. And this is a very inefficient use of resources.

Advantages and disadvantages of prefabricated circulation

So, having the inputs for your task - layout dimensions, colors, paper density - as well as inputs for other editions, the printing house can choose “fellow travelers” for you, laying out the tasks on the appropriate printed sheets and knowing that there is still space left on some sheets or knowing that in a few days there will be people who want to join your printed sheet.

Don't turn down a great opportunity. Prefabricated circulation helps to significantly save on human labor, plates, preparation and printing time. This means that the print will be significantly cheaper. An additional bonus is increased environmental friendliness, since less paper is consumed.

However, it is worth considering certain limitations. First of all, you will need to seek consensus with other customers on the grade and density of paper. Or be content with what the printing house offers. Although for frequent and widespread orders this is unlikely to be a problem, since the choice, as a rule, comes down to standard media.

Another drawback is the use of standard inks. If you need some kind of corporate Pantone, then you are unlikely to find the same fellow travelers. But the concept of assembly itself most often concerns ordinary orders, where the standard triad is quite enough.

Assembled circulations are possible if the technical parameters match: circulation size, printing medium, color. Therefore, in some cases, the circulation may be printed with a slight delay. This time is required to collect and arrange the required number of other orders on the sheet. But if you didn’t need printing yesterday, you should wait a little.

However, most often prefabricated print runs only speed up production. You don't have to stand in line while 50 different orders are filled. They will be laid out on one sheet and the customer will receive the circulation in record time.

Results

Collected circulations are fast and profitable. Especially in a good printing house with well-functioning production. But you need to take into account that they do not imply an individual approach. This is an excellent option for printing standard products - flyers, business cards, leaflets and the like. Unfortunately, when ordering products with a unique shape, additional colors or unusual post-printing finishing, you won’t be able to save money.