Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Footprinters

I found the website of the collective that Garry wants to work with: http://www.footprinters.co.uk/. Their section 'what we can print' shows the limitations of the company are quite vast:

The Risographs (digital duplicator presses) are designed for short run work. This usually means between 50 and 10,000 copies. They work by squeezing ink through a paper 'master', a bit like screen-printing. This does mean that photographs come out slightly pixelated, but nearly all our work is done on them. They print on paper and light card up to A3 in size. We currently have a black, blue, green and red ink and are happy to send samples of previously printed work or single-page proofs of your job so you can see what the colours are like. The ink for one of the machines is soy-based and it's the most eco-friendly printing technology we've come across (after potato printing). >The colour laser printer (Oki) is capable of printing full colour high resolution jobs up to SRA3 (A3 with full bleed) and on paper up to 300gsm. It also prints b&w at a fraction of the cost of full colour. It works by heat-fusing toner to the page, which leaves a slightly shiny surface to the print and is not remotely eco-friendly (but then neither is most offset printing). This printer is ideal for print runs of up to about 500 copies.For longer run full colour work we do all the pre-press work and send it out to another printer to print on recycled paper that we have supplied. Because at present we effectively bulk buy from the printers to whom we out source, we can often get work done at a better rate than if you went direct to them yourself.
The vast majority of our printing work is booklets and news sheets. These are generally up to about 40 pages in size and print runs of up to 2000. We have, however, printed books and booklets over 150 pages in length and print runs of up to 50 000. We've also printed an assortment of fliers, posters, record and CD sleeves, peel and stick labels, gummed labels, business cards, swing tags, food labels and bookmarks.

This shouldn't be looked upon as a negative thing though, and whilst this should be a consideration, it should only be a consideration in terms of producing a publication that really pushes the collective to the limits of what they can do, which would be really interesting.

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