*Our Head of Production, Mark Gaffney is passionate about print, and more importantly quality print. In this blog he talks about how he believes paper quality is crucial to every job and should be considered right from the start.*
Simple right? I just want a full colour image printed on white paper. How hard can it be?
Paper quality is the first thing on my mind when a brief lands on my desk. Who is the client? How are they seen in the marketplace? What will best showcase their imagery, and what look and feel are they trying to achieve?
Long gone are the days of just printing material on whatever your preferred supplier’s house stock was. Or better still ‘whacking’ it on any old silk coated paper.
Clients can invest a lot of money in great quality photography, more so I’ve found than in years gone by. They’ll pay for retouching, rendering, grading and all kinds of fancy image manipulation techniques so that they can get the best from it. So why, at the final stage, would you spoil all that hard work by printing it on some ‘non-researched’ paper that washes out all that graft?
I believe in ‘wowing’ clients with the end result. Too many times I’ve seen printed collateral on the wrong stocks. For example, a piece for an agricultural company was printed on a gloss with a gloss lamination! What really!?!? You guys are so environmentally friendly that you cover your printed literature with glossy plastic!? Wouldn’t a nice uncoated stock look and feel better to reflect your brand values? It wasn’t even full of fancy bright imagery. At least then you could have said ‘ok, I see why that’s so glossy’.
Or better still, there was a metal construction company who had beautifully retouched chrome hero photography, but it was printed on an off white sheet which bled through onto the chrome areas giving it a dirty yellow feel.
If you look at the standard range of stocks – gloss, matt, silk, uncoated, these are just the start. Within these standard stocks you also have a huge range of papers from various merchants that print differently. For instance, a matt paper from one merchant will print differently to another merchant’s matt paper. It’s essential as a print manager to know all ranges of paper and stocks. Especially now that print has to have standout.
I haven’t even begun to talk about the vast array of creative papers. Don’t get me started. These really do open up the ability to print outstanding eye catching, touchy feely print. But that’s for another time. Oh, and what about offset, cracking and bulk? Sorry, I’ll shut up now.
But just remember folks, the choice of paper stock is as important as the imagery or text you’re printing on it.