Small Details Make or Break A Project

What does hitting a baseball have to do with successful printing? Both require the mastery of minute details. In baseball, the distance between a long home run and a short pop-up - a successful result and an unsuccessful one - is a few hundred feet. At the moment the bat meets the ball, however, the distance between those results is a fraction of an inch. No wonder even the best hitters succeed only three times for every ten trips to the plate!

Don’t let your project look like this. Involve Springfield Printing early in the planning process to eliminate headaches before they happen.

Fortunately, the "batting average" for successful print projects is much higher. At Springfield Printing, we understand that outstanding quality comes down to little details (and, yes, fractions of an inch). That's why throughout the job planning process, our sales, customer service and production professionals check more than 50 "red flag" items that may affect the overall quality - and success - of your projects. Here are a few examples:

Grain direction - Whenever possible, projects should be imposed to fold with the grain of the paper to minimize cracking. For many projects, such as those with heavy, dark ink coverage or on sheets of 100lb. text weight or thicker, scoring will also be required. While a grain-parallel layout may not be the most efficient one for a project, the improvement in fold quality over a cross-grain layout almost always makes up for it.

Copy positioning - Text and images should be moved away from the spine on projects that will be drilled, such as those that will be Wire-O or spiral-wire bound. These margins vary based on the type of binding and thickness of the finished product, but are typically about ½". We measure and test-drill pre-production samples to check for copy positioning prior to printing.

Sheet Protection - Aqueous coatings and varnishes help "seal" your sheets to prevent marking and offsetting and to allow for faster handling. Press-applied coatings are highly recommended on projects printed on dull-coated, matte-coated or highly-calendared uncoated paper stocks, or those that include heavy ink coverage (particularly reflex blues). Shrink wrapping adds another measure of protection and helps avoid transit marking.

The Springfield Printing Advantage
Our attention to these "red flag" items is just one way we strive to help you create successful print projects. With our computer-to-plate workflow, multiple sheetfed presses and extensive bindery capabilities - including in-house die-cutting - we give you complete peace-of-mind when your projects are in our hands. Give us a call today and let us help you "bat a thousand" on your next project.