June 27, 2007

  • Printer Talk

    I designed our invitations this weekend! I must say, I'm pretty darn proud of the semi-finished product. I'm a complete novice when it comes to Adobe Illustrator (never touched the program before wedding planning), so you can imagine how ecstatic I was when they came out looking pretty professional! You'll have to wait until I get the invitations printed for a peek.

    Also, my sample order from Cards and Pockets came in on Saturday:

    cardsnpockets
    I ordered every shade of pink, green, ivory, and brown under the sun.

    cardsnpockets2
    I narrowed the selection down to combination of three of these colors, with the dark chocolate as our pocketfolds, a pink matting sheet, and cream paper for the invitation and inserts. But the cream paper will come directly from the printing company. Green will be used for the closure of the pockets.

    Through referrals, Mr. Eggplant found a printing company located conveniently near us: Fong Brothers Printing in Brisbane. They came highly recommended by a coworker who also designed her own wedding invitations and had them printed. Apparently, Fong Brothers is the largest printing company in northern California, but I hadn't heard of them until now, probably because I've never had to run a print job before. Through this design process, I've discovered that printing is a whole new and very complicated world! I guess I always thought that a printer receives a file and hits a print button and voila! Printed goodness. But nooo, there is a TON to learn if for a print-impaired bride that is designing and printing her own invitations.

    I don't know anything when it comes to printing, so please bear with me if I'm butchering the terms. I'll try to reiterate what Mr. Eggplant was explaining to me about the process. He attempted to educate me on digital printing, but all I really got from his explanation was that it involves a very, very expensive and advanced laser printer that uses magnetism or electric charges to attract ink, and this differs from an inkjet which prints by transferring lots of small ink dots onto paper. Our other option is offset printing which involves images that are put on plates which are dampened first by water, then ink. The ink adheres to the image area, the water to the non-image area. Then the image is transferred to a rubber blanket, and from the rubber blanket to paper (explanation and picture from howstuffworks.com).

     offset-printing9  

    Fong Brothers provides both digital and offset printing services. We've decided to go with the digital four-color process for our job, which is different than Mrs. Plumeria's spot ink process. From my limited understanding, offset printing is higher quality and more expensive, however since we're mainly printing text and a few simple graphics and we're not using metallic or flourescent inks (which can only be provided through offset), the quality will not be compromised anything noticeable to the naked eye.

    Anyway, more details to come as I embark on this adventure. I'll be happy to share everything I learn as a novice that's running a print job for the very first time. For now, here's a helpful article that I referred to while preparing print ready files.