What have you done for the environment today?

By brandywine | Published: June 23, 2010

I consider myself a bit of an outdoorsman. My most favorite place to be is in the woods, surrounded by God’s creation. I hate to see development come in and destroy my favorite places in the world. I think that some of us think this way, and get emotionally involved when trying to help the environment. We get so blinded by our mission to help, that sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees (pardon the pun).

I hear people talking about the environment and what they can do for it everyday. It frustrates me, however when I hear the different ideas that people think help the environment, versus what actually helps. Of course in my industry, the idea that frustrates me the most is the term, “save a tree”.

My life has been simplified by the reduction of paper in our office. What used to take several file cabinets, now takes up a seven inch square on my desk in my Mac Mini. So I agree that the paperless life is more organized and easier than dealing with all those random papers. So if folks want to eliminate paper for those types of things, more power to ‘em. However, using the environment as an excuse not to use paper is quite uneducated, and will actually accomplish exactly the opposite in the long run. Here’s the breakdown:

•Paper companies employ tens of thousands of people, and a lot of them manage forests and make sure that trees are growing properly. They don’t just buy property to clear cut and then leave it barren.

•These forests create lots of jobs, and while the forests are growing (for decades) they provide lots of homes for animals, not to mention the Co2 that is converted to oxygen.

•As we stop using paper, (to help the environment) the paper companies are forced to sell these managed properties. The companies that generally purchase this accessible property plan on developing it (not very good for the environment).

•So not using paper accomplishes exactly the opposite of what we are trying to prevent.

If this information peaks your curiosity, do some research on carbon. Energy is created through using carbon. Educate yourself on this, and arm yourself with the information that you find.

I stumbled onto this cool little video that International Paper posted on Youtube, and thought I would share it with you.  Enjoy!

If you like reading stuff more than watching videos, check out this article from PBS:

http://bit.ly/c7FR8l

Posted in Enviroment, Experts, Paper, Printing, Recycling | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

How much do you weigh?

By brandywine | Published: June 22, 2010

Hold onto your hat for this one, I’m going to attempt to explain the difference between paper weights.  Not the kind that sits on your desk. No, the confusing labyrinth of numbers that come into play when deciding which weight paper to print your letterhead, or those flyers for the church fund raiser on.  If you’re in charge of printing the HOA newsletter for your home owner’s association, how do you know if you should use 80# text or 80# cover?  I’m going to try to shed some light on the situation, but I have to warn you… there are people who have been in the printing industry for decades who can’t explain this, so if it doesn’t work out for me, give me another chance… Maybe I’ll try to explain something easier, like the BCS.

Ok so lets cover the basics first. There are two things that need to be understood.

First and easiest to understand, is thickness, or GSM (it stands for grammage somehow). GSM is confusing to folks in our industry, because it is a fairly new system in America, because it is based on the metric system. The GSM is calculated by weighng the paper and counting the grams per square meter (g/m²).  Somewhere along the way we replaced the “/” with an “S” and came up with GSM.

Next, we have the more complicated “Basis Weight”. This is the typical way that we have referred to paper in America for decades.The basis weight is calculated by taking 500 sheets of a type of paper and weighing it. But not just 500 sheets the way your probably thinking, no, I’m talking about “parent sheets”, these vary from 17″ x 22″ all the way up to 25″ x 38″. So if you think about all the different sizes, and thicknesses, you can understand how this stuff can be very confusing.

There are several “types” of paper that have to be determined before any “weights” can be calculated. Some of these types include Bond, Writing, Book, Text, Offset, Cover, Index & Bristol.  Those are the the most popular types of paper used in the printing industry. Once the type  of paper is figured out, the weight comes next. Each type of paper has a particular parent sheet size that is weighed 500 sheets at a time. Using this formula, standard copy paper (20# bond) is weighed in 17″ x 22″ sheets, so apparently 500 of these sheets weigh 20 lbs, or what we call 20# bond. Not to keep boring you, but for clarification purposes, I’ll do another one.  60# text is weighed in a larger sheet size, 25″ x 38″. So 500 sheets of this large sized sheet weigh 60 lbs, and we call it 60# text.

Imagine that each type of paper has it’s own column of weights listed. If the all of the columns were then placed beside each other based on the actual thickness of the paper, some of the weights would be the same thickness, with totally different weights.  For instance 24# writing and 60# text are exactly the same thickness.  I have made a chart the best way that I could below.  Hopefully it will hep make some sense out of all this crazyness!

#1 20lb Bond/Writing 75 gsm same weight as 50lb Book/Text/Offset
#2 24lb Bond/Writing 90 gsm same weight as 60lb Book/Text/Offset
#3 28lb Bond/Writing 105 gsm same weight as 70lb Book/Text/Offset
#4 32lb Bond/Writing 120 gsm same weight as 80lb Book/Text/Offset
#5 50lb Book/Text/Offset 75 gsm same weight as 20lb Bond/Writing
#6 60lb Book/Text/Offset 90 gsm same weight as 24lb Bond/Writing
#7 70lb Book/Text/Offset 105 gsm same weight as 28lb Bond/Writing
#8 80lb Book/Text/Offset 120 gsm same weight as 32lb Bond/Writing
#9 100lb Text 150 gsm similar weight as 67lb Bristol
#10 67lb Bristol 145 gsm similar weight as 100lb Text
#11 90lb Index 165 gsm similar weight as 65lb Cover
#12 110lb Index 200 gsm similar weight as 80lb Cover
#13 140lb Index 255 gsm somewhat similar weight as 100lb Cover
#14 65lb Cover 175 gsm similar weight as 90lb Index
#15 80lb Cover 215 gsm similar weight as 110lb Index
#16 100lb Cover 275 gsm somewhat similar weight as 140lb Index
#17 130lb Cover 350 gsm no other comparison on this list

I hope that this little lesson in my world helps you understand what paper that you need for you next project.  If you’re still confused, just give us a shout and we’ll help you make the right decision. Until then, I’ll be watching my weight!

Posted in Experts, Offset, Paper, Printing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Will you give me some money?

By brandywine | Published: May 3, 2010

One of the things that I love about our industry (that’s the printing industry… incase you found this blog accidentally) is that most businesses need printing to some extent.  Some businesses realize that, and some don’t… we’ll talk about the folks that do.

I am cheap.  When it comes to my money, I don’t like to turn lose of it at all.  Unless I’ve had my eye on something for a while, or maybe if I stumble upon some sort of investment, I don’t spend money.  This “quality” sometimes makes it difficult to be a business person.  Sometimes it prevents me from providing the exact product that someone wants, because I wouldn’t spend my own money on the same product.

So I put my thinking cap on (it’s a little tight these days, I don’t use it much) to try to figure out what made people buy the printed material that we provide. This is what I came up with:

First, all printed material is a form of communication, so we’ll have to agree that every product that any printer offers, conveys some sort of information.  The two things that motivate people to buy printing:

#1. Emotion

#2. It makes the buyer money

So first we’ll cover the emotional purchase.  This would be something like wedding invitations or baby announcements. These are things that convey information that make people feel good… so it’s an emotional purchase.

On to the second motivator. If it’s not an emotional purchase, then it must make you money. Now seriously, stop and think about this.  WHY would you spend money on printing if it doesn’t fall under one of these two categories. Really, let me know if you think of a reason.

We print for two different kinds of companies, non-profits, and for-profits. Both types spend money with us on printing, and the reason that both of them do is because it makes them money. Period. Non-profits still have an operating budget just like every other company (should). The difference is that they generally aren’t’ delivering product to generate money, they rely on other revenue generators.  Most of the time these sources are other companies or individuals that donate money to the cause. This is where we come in.  We print a message for the non-profit in order to make potential donors aware that this may be an excellent place for them to contribute to. So you see, even with non profits, it’s still about money.

The rest of the businesses that we print for are generally trying to increase their product awareness, or improve their image, or educate their prospects  (kind of like this blog). If you think about it, there really isn’t a product that we offer that doesn’t make businesses money in one way or the other. I’ll list a few and you think about them:

Trifold brochures

Pocket folders

Advertising slicks

* those are obvious, how about these next examples*

Custom invoices

Purchase orders

Bill of laiding

Quote sheets

Envelopes

All of this stuff either generates sales (money) or makes systems more efficient (money). And to be honest, even though we love helping people, our end motivation is also money. So we’re all in the big money pot together.

We’ve been printing for a long time, so we’ve printed a lot of different things to make other folks money.  If you need any ideas, set up an appointment to come in and talk with us.  We’ll make sure that you don’t spend more money than you could make with any particular project!

Posted in Brandywine, Experts, Marketing, Printing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Do you bleed?

By brandywine | Published: March 29, 2010

Lets talk about bleeds.  Not bleeding… like bloody messy bleeding.  I’m talking about your design bleeding… you know, off the edge of the paper.  See, most people don’t understand that ink can’t magically run off of the edge of a sheet of paper.  Think about it like this, if the ink goes all the way to the edge, there must be a portion of the ink that falls off the edge right?  So where would it go?  See, that’s the where the problem is.  The ink that runs off the edge does have to go somewhere, and unfortunately, technology hasn’t provided a good place for it to go at this point.  So until a better answer reveals itself, here’s how we do it.

Let’s start with this template:

The size of a standard business card is 2″ x 3.5″ (inches) but you should make your document size 2.25″ x 3.75″. This will allow us to cut of .125″ off of all four sides of the business card.  So your background color, or image can go all the way to the edge (the red line) of your document, but you have to remember that we will be cutting some of it off, so mind your margins. Oh ya, margins… you might be one of the folks that wants to squeak every possible square millimeter out of the available real estate out of your business card. If so, i need you to take a break.  A business card with improper margins screams, “I designed my own business card, because I’m to cheap to pay a professional, and that makes me unprofessional as well!”  So, mind your margins!  I don’t mind if you design your own business  card, just follow the rules, and make it look professional.  The minimum distance from the edge of the card (the red line) and any edges of your text, or images that you want on the card (the blue line) needs to be at least .1875″ (3/16″).  I personally think that .25″ (1/4″) looks even better.

So if you do everything right your business cards should look like this:

See those little lines at the corners?  We call those, “Crop Marks”.  They are the cutting guidelines that we use.  They are guidelines, not set in stone.  That way, if something looks un-balanced, we can use some of the bleed to fix a visual problem.  If you made your document the right size, we have 1/8″ to play with!

Here are some incorrect versions of the same card.

The first one has crop marks but no bleed.  If you connect the lines from side to side, and top to bottom, you’ll see that if we cut those lines it would be right on the edge of the card.  The down side to this would be that we either have to cut a little into the card, making it smaller than a standard size business card, or we risk having a tiny white line, on one or more of the sides of the card.  Either of those options would be ugly, and unprofessional.

This is an example of the most common file that we receive from customers.  The document size is exactly 2″ x 3.5″, with no bleeds or crop marks.  We can live without crop marks, as long as you tell us how much bleed you put in the the file.  But you have to build in bleed.  We can’t just scale it larger, because that messes up the margins.

So the moral of the story is, either follow the rules when designing your own business card, or hire a professional designer to do it for you.  Oh ya by the way, if the professional designer doesn’t know these rules, make sure they get a link to this blog, you’ll save us a bunch of time, and help them be more “professional”!   ;)

Posted in Design, Experts, Printing, business cards | Leave a comment

Are you an Expert?

By brandywine | Published: March 14, 2010

Someone called the shop the other day looking for a “Printing Expert”. I never really thought about being an expert before. “Printer” was just a title that I shared with Benjamin Franklin and a few thousand other folks in my chosen profession. I wasn’t exactly sure what separated a printing expert from any other printing professional. So I asked some of our customers and vendors what they thought a printing expert was, and did I qualify. This is what I learned:

The first category that I’ll talk about are printing brokers. Printing Brokers are good sales people, and some know a good deal about printing, but only a handful could be considered “Printing Experts”. Brokers will find a prospect that needs printing, get all of the specs for the job, and contact several print shops that they trust, looking for the best price. Their relationship with the printers that produce work for them is based on trust, because they rely on the printer to deliver the printed piece, on time. In the 80’s brokers could be very successful, but these days the need for printed materials is not as broad as it once once was, and it’s harder for brokers to find good pricing. As a matter of fact, these days, there are a only a few “trade shops” (wholesale) across the country that I know about. So in my opinion, printing brokers are rarely experts.

Some printers are good at what they do, but they don’t do much. At least they don’t offer much in the way of a product line. They are experts in the products that they offer, but those products are not very broad. They generally specialize in black and white copies, and color copies produced on a high speed copier like the ones at Kinko’s. These guys have invested in equipment, but only the basics. They will take on some larger projects, that need to be outsourced to larger shops with more sophisticated equipment, but they generally shy away from the more complex pieces that might need to be die cut or foil stamped. So I wouldn’t take away that these kind of printers aren’t experts, but I would call them “Copy Experts” instead of “Printing Experts”.

The next possible Printing Experts I’ll review are the mega commercial print shops. These shops are obviously either experts, or just gazillionaires. The equipment that they use costs millions of dollars, and the customers that they serve, pay them millions more. They take care of the biggest companies that you can think of. You would have to be an expert in your field in order to deal with fortune 100 companies on a daily basis. So, yes, in my opinion, the big guys are definitely printing experts.

Now we’ll talk about about the print shops that I know the most about. These are the family businesses, and the shops that some person started as a dream, or a hobby. They’re artists, because the owners are the people running the printing presses. These printers are the ones that serve the American Businesses that fuel our economy. The companies that purchase the printing that these shops produce need the largest variety of products. They need business cards, ad slicks, pocket folders. They need materials to go in the pocket folders, they need letterhead, and envelopes. They want cool creative things that are foil stamped, embossed, die cut, folded and glued. They need all kinds of materials for their sales people to be effective. They need postcards and all sorts of other printed stuff to get their message out to their prospects and customers. For a printer to be able to serve these customer’s needs they must be printing experts. These printers have to know every aspect of all of these processes. All of the other printers that I talked about are specialists. This category of printers is a cross section of American commerce. They absolutely have to be “Printing Experts”

By the way, Brandywine Printing falls in the last category that I talked about. The four Brandywine team members that have been in the industry the longest have a combined 115 years experience. Not to mention that the owners can operate every piece of equipment in the building…. except for one. Come on by the shop for a tour to find out which machine it is, until then, consider us your “Printing Experts”!

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First impression… how is yours?

By brandywine | Published: March 11, 2010

Every time we meet someone new, we make a first impression of some sort. Once we realize that this is a fact, we can be aware of how others see us. This is true in our personal lives as well as our business lives. This post will focus on the business side of things.

Let’s say that you’re a business owner, or maybe you’re in sales. Either way, you represent a company, and a product or service that must be sold, in order for your company to exist. Different companies have different strategies for getting their message out to the masses, and I may have a biased opinion, but I think that printed material plays a large part into the way that companies are initially judged.

Here are a couple of scenarios:

You have a meeting with a prospect, one chance to make your first impression. You make your introduction, present your business card, and make your self comfortable for the next part of the meeting. You make your pitch, and have a great meeting, you feel great about it! It’s time to get the heck out of there before you talk yourself out of sale. You shake hands, and let your prospect know how much you enjoyed meeting them, and you leave… Speaking of leave, the only thing that you had to leave with your prospect, was your business card. I sure hope it was special!

Let’s say that your prospect is one of those folks who never purchases anything without talking to three potential vendors. Now let’s say that one of those vendors, your competition, has invested in their first impression. They have had pocket folders and ad slicks printed up, and the pocket folder has some snazzy embossing or foil stamping on the front. This dude doesn’t just hand his business card out, he nails the prospect with a nice hefty package. This is the sort of collateral piece that says, “Look at me, I’ve been here a while, and I’m serious about my business.”

So your prospect has had a couple first impressions, and now they have to get back to what they do best, which is what we all do best… make money for our company (unless your company is a non-profit). So a couple days go by, and the first impressions are getting a little fuzzy with all the busyness of business… you know what I mean. So now it comes time for your prospect to make a decision on the new vendors that they have been “interviewing”. The prospect retrieves all of the information that was left with them. Your business card gets a glance, but the prospect picks up the pocket folder, kicks their chair back and settles in to read your competition’s literature, not to mention checking out all of the full color pictures in their trifold brochure!

What can you do to improve your first impression? Invest in it! Of course you printing isn’t the only thing that contributes to the way that people judge you. You should dress professionally, take care of your hygiene, be polite and helpful, just to name my personal top three.

If you think that you can’t afford to have your company’s sales materials professionally printed, think again. Call your local commercial printshop (stay away from the internet printers, they only care about your money, not your image) and ask them for their advice. Let them know what your budget is and ask what options you have within your financial limits. Your local printer will have several options for you. Go see them and let them help you make a great first impression. Your competition won’t know what hit ‘em!

Posted in Digital, Marketing, Offset, Printing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Digital Printing is here!

By brandywine | Published: March 1, 2010

Brandywine has gone digital!  People used to ask me when we were going to start offering digital printing, and my response was something like… “Never!”  Well now I’m sitting here eating my hat.  We installed our first digital machine last week, and we’re not looking back.

The digital age has been upon us for several years.  It’s not that we were scared of it, we just didn’t jump on the wagon when all the other guys in our industry did.  Using traditional offset printing presses, we have been able to deliver a very high quality product on a very consistent basis.  However, as buying trends change, we see companies that need printing focus their marketing efforts more directly.  This focused marketing results in lower quantities of printed materials.

The downside to offset printing is the preparation costs, or as it has been labeled “setup costs”.  These costs are associated with everything that it takes to get ready to print, before the first sheet of paper is ever touched. The plates, the ink, the time that it takes to line everything up… not to mention cleaning the press up at the end of the job.  All of that stuff has to be paid for regardless of the quantity of sheets printed, and it takes a lot of materials.  The upside of offset printing is that it’s the golden standard when it comes to printing.  Sheet fed offset printing can’t be duplicated.  It’s a process that has been perfected over the last one hundred years or so.  When it comes to printing, there is no process more consistent than offset.

Now digital printing on the other hand is a different animal.  The downside is that the consistency and quality don’t compare to the offset process, but as time moves on it’s getting closer… everyday!  There must be an upside to digital printing… Yep, here it is.  The quality is very good, and pretty consistent, but there are no preparation costs associated with each job.

There are three basic costs in digital printing;

•1 The payment on the machine.

•2 Something called a click charge, which covers all of the repairs, maintenance, and toner needed.

•3  The labor involved int he production process.

Believe it or not, that is very simplified compared to the costs of offset printing. So the biggest advantage of digital printing is PRICE!  As customer expectations fall, and digital quality rises the price is the deciding factor.

We have seen some of the largest companies move to purchasing digital pieces.  The lower prices of digital printing compared to offset printing, have allowed companies who purchase printing regularly to spread their budget around to more projects.  So digital printing isn’t hurting our industry, the money is still being spent, it just purchases more value than it has in the past.  Digital is here to stay… and so is Brandywine!

Posted in Brandywine, Digital, Marketing, Offset, Printing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

1st Blog!

By brandywine | Published: January 1, 2010

Happy New Year!!! Welcome to our new and improved Brandywine Printing website. A new decade is upon us, and I’ve wondered how we’re going to refer to the previous decade… You know, in the 70’s we had bellbottoms and Afros. The 80’s brought in big hair, and sitcoms. The 90’s came around and introduced the Internet, and cell phones. Now here’s where the problem comes in. It’s easy to write that in the 00’s we saw the resurfacing of bellbottoms and Afros. But how do I say it? 00’s… hmmm. Let me know when you figure it out.

Brandywine Printing has been in business for several decades, and we’ve seen the trends in the printing industry change over the years as well. In the 80’s it seemed like the thing to do when approaching retirement age was to buy an offset printing franchise, hire some one to run the printing press and squirrel money away for the true retirement years. It was a no brainer!

The 90’s and the personal computers came around and changed the products that businesses purchased. Instead of buying the traditional letterhead, envelopes, invoices and business forms, companies began producing these items on their own, using personal computers and color laser printers.

The previous decade, the 00’s whatever we’re going to call them changed things in offset printing even more. This decade introduced the “digital age”. With it came email. Yes believe it or not, email was a novelty before the year 2000. Other “ground breaking” technologies in the 00’s were digital printing, color copies, PDF workflows, direct to plate systems, and the best of all Internet based printing companies (ie. vista print… and sarcasm). All of these things either sped up the printing process or made it more affordable.

Now we’ve arrived in the 10’s or teens, as I’ve decided to call them, even though we’re officially in the “tweens”. I believe that this name will catch on before any one gets confused, like with the 00’s. The Internet and email has contributed significantly to the decline of standard office stationary, direct mail, and newsletter printing. This decline turned the printing industry on its ear! The printshops that have endured the change in buying habits over the last couple of years, and are equipped with the technology to face the next couple of years will be around for a long time. Brandywine Printing is proud to be one of those printshops. Rest assured that we’ll be here when you need us!

Be sure to let us know what you think about our new website, and if you haven’t stopped by the shop in awhile call and schedule a personal tour!

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