economical printing – Digital Imaging Inc

Making Digital Work For You Part VI

Posted by Michael at 11:53 AM

Jul 302011

Variable Data: The Gorilla in the Room

Say what you will about digital printing, there’s no getting around the one thing it does hands-down better than traditional ink on paper. And that’s variable data. If information is the engine of today’s business, then data is the fuel that drives that engine. And it’s the fuel that makes variable data technology work as well,

When we were typesetters, so long ago, our motto was, “He who keeps the most copies, wins.” In the course of any particular typesetting project, edits were made and crossed out, phone edits (this was before email) painstakingly recorded, and countless copies of interim print-outs produced and held on to. When there was (heaven forbid) a typo, it wasn’t hard to track its source down. A two-edged sword to be sure, but knowledge was power. And it still is.

For today’s information-driven world, it’s “he who keeps the most data, wins.” And one of the places you need the data to win is in variable data printing. As someone who learned to set up a California Job Case in high school (the “California Job Case” is a wooden frame that has compartments for the hot metal type pieces used in letterpress; the particular configuration by that name was supposed to reduce a typesetters hand movement by half a mile a day), I have seen some interesting technological developments in the print industry in my time. None has been more under-utilized than variable data printing. The reason is simple: we just don’t keep enough of the right kind of data.

Do you know what each of your customer’s favorite color is? Their favorite sport? Vacation destination? Food? Birthday month?

Extraneous information? Maybe. But in the hands of a skilled variable data designer, you can produce a promotional piece that might just have the extra edge it needs to really stand out from the crowd. Variable data technology allows you to leverage the information you have acquired to make print presentations more attractive on a very personal level. Variable data allows you to use different type or graphics on each piece of a print run. Seeing your name on the side of a train or movie marquee in a direct mail piece is a powerful motivator to read on. A catalog with a skier on the front is more attractive to someone who enjoys that sport than a catalog with a surfboarder on the cover. But you don’t have to pick one or the other. If you know what your customer is interested in, you can deliver that image through the magic of variable data technology.

Variable data technology has been around for a while. We “beta tested” the first version of “Darwin,” a surprisingly robust plug-in for Quark and were immediately struck by the potential power of the software, in the right hands. Unfortunately, except for some very large firms, the right hands seem hard to come by. It always seems strange that a company with thousands of accounts (or more) knew more about their customers than small firms with just hundreds of accounts. (Then again, maybe we’re just not meeting the right people.)

So we’ve ambled along, using this great technology for essentially mail-merge applications, although it has also proven useful for consecutive numbering applications, certificates, fund drive letters, and dealer-loader promotions. Will it ever live up to its promise? I hope so. Once you have the data, the additional cost to use it is almost negligible. And variable data printing is no more expensive per piece (at least here at Digital Imaging) than non variable data printing. Some additional set-up costs are involved, but they are usually quite minimal if the document is set up properly.

The value is definitely there. The effectiveness has been documented. All we need is the data. There’s an old proverb which goes something like this: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second best time is now.” The best time to start collecting data on your customers was ten years ago, the second best time is now. Begin building your data base. Put it on a simple Excel or other “flat” spread sheet. Every entry is a deposit that can draw interest on as it helps you build more effective print marketing. This is a technology you can use right now.

Making Digital Work For You: Part I

Posted by Michael at 2:05 PM

Apr 122011

Ain’t technology grand? Digital printing has certainly changed things. Few of our customers today know what rubylith is (or was), have ever seen a stat camera, or have come home at the end of the day with a few miscellaneous words stuck to their elbow like oversized flakes of dandruff.

But digital printing is a two-edged sword and it takes some special considerations to get the most out of it. Let’s begin with the most obvious one, color. At a traditional printer (ink on paper), each color you add will probably change the price of your job. At most digital printers (toner-based), there’s one price for color and one for black and white. At a traditional printer you may pay a bit more for a piece printed, say, all in blue. It will probably include the expense of a press wash, but it will still be a one-color project. At a digital printer, you will probably be charged the same price as if you were printing a full color photograph covering that page.

These are considerations that should probably be made at the the design level. Once you’ve designed the piece in one color, you’ve substantially diminished the likelihood of digital printing as an economical choice down the line. On the other hand, if you plan on using digital output, let your creative juices fly and take advantage of the power of color to make your point or sell your product. Don’t forget to add color photos wherever you can. This is an expensive process in traditional printing; you need scanning, 4-color separations, and careful alignment of the plates for it to work. Not so in digital printing; take the electronic file of the image and drop it in the layout. Done. Well, you might want to make sure the image is CMYK and not RGB.

Which brings me to difference between the color models. If you’ve ever gotten your digital prints back and noticed that the color photos looked a bit flat or off color, there’s a chance you may have used RGB files instrad of CMYK. Most digital cameras, by default, shoot in RGB. This is the Red-Green-Blue color model. Almost all the light that is emitted by natural sources (e.g the Sun) is in this color spectrum, as most probably is the monitor you are viewing this page. It is the spectrum of transmitted light. If you think way, way back to High School health class, you may vaguely remember something about “rods” and “cones.” Well, that’s the connection, we see by interpreting the RGB spectrum. If you do the math you find there’s nearly 17,000,000 colors you can make with this combination (there are 256 steps of each color that are possible on your RGB monitor). Turn on the red, green and blue lights full strength on you monitor (or in the Sun) and you have white.

CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) on the other hand, is what we see when most things are printed. It is a product of reflected light. Actually there are only three colors involved: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Black is added because we live in an imperfect world. In theory, if you mix 100% Cyan, 100% Magenta and 100% Yellow, you should get Black. But you actually get a muddy reddish brown. Black is added both to achieve a real black and to replace some of the other colors in a process called Under Color Removal (UCR) or Grey Component Reduction (GCR). Maybe more about that at a later time. The CMYK spectrum only gets us about a million colors (100 steps of each of the three).

How and where an image is converted from RGB to CMYK is critical to how it will look when it’s printed. As you can see, the gamut (or range of colors) in RGB is substantially greater than that of CMYK. And since 100% of all the colors in one model equals white and in the other it equals black, you might guess there is more to converting between the two than meets the eye. The best plan is to convert the color in software designed for that purpose: PhotoShop. While most RIPs will do this conversion on the fly, some handle it much better than others. Making the conversion yourself in PhotoShop will at least let you know which colors, if any, will change.