The cost of the paper alone can amount to about half – 50% – of the entire job. So even a slight change in your selection can have a dramatic cost effect. And the larger the quanity of whatever it is you’re printing the greater a percentage that the paper will comprise. If you’re printing 5,000 sales sheets, for instance, paper might be only 20% of your cost; but printing a catalog, book, or magazine, can easily go over 50% depending on quanity.

That’s simply because all of the one-time costs for the job, mostly in prepress and set-up time, are the same for every project. But after the job is running smoothly on the press, paper is mostly what you’re paying for.

Now that you know that there is such a thing as “right paper,” you’ll need to learn some of the methods of becoming an informed print buyer when it comes to paper. Here are a few of ways to go about this:

If you’re the print buyer working directly with a printer, and have no middle person, like a graphic designer with you, it’s reasonable and common to have the printer bring you samples to review. These samples can be of two types.

The first would be paper sample books, which are bound together small sheets (see photos below). Every print shop will have many paper manufacturer’s samples that they work with, and which you, as the customer, can ask to see. These sample books are usually by specific types of paper, even within the same manufacturer. For instance, there are sample books for uncoated and coated; book or cover paper; colors or whites, textured and smooth. You might ask to see their sample book for white coated papers, for example, and suddenly end up with dozens to choose from – all fairly similar, yet all with a different cost.

Another way to check paper samples, used mostly by less experienced buyers, would be to look at actual sample printed sheets of some of the printer’s commonly used papers. What could be easier than looking at something similar to what you had in mind and just saying “OK”?

There’s really no problem with that so long as your piece is typical and the design is not unique. Sometimes the printer will add that this is their “normal” or “favorite” paper stock and they usually have a lot on hand, meaning that your job might get done a bit faster. It’s also more work for a printer, especially on a small job, to get prices for different papers, check availability, and place a special order. So just be aware that your paper shopping time might become a nuisance to the printer, even though it’s your prerogative.

In another article I’ll go into more detail on the actual kinds of papers out there and what you and your designer might consider.

Bond

Bond paper is used for stationery, letterheads, forms, direct mail ads, announcements, prices lists, and invoices.

Bond papers are noted for their strength, permanence, good appearance, crisp feel, ink receptive surface, good erasing quality, and lack of paper fuzz (tiny fibers.) They’re usually made from rag fiber, cotton fiber, or other chemical wood pulps in a wide range of qualities.

Rag bond is a very classic style of letterhead paper and gives a warm, traditional feel. It’s usually watermarked and comes in various textures, such as laid or in a wove form. The rag content can range from 25 to 100%, with the more rag content being more expensive and delicate.

Since bond paper is fairly hard, with an even smooth finish, they won’t absorb any kind of ink into the body of the paper.

Book

Book papers can be coated or uncoated and can be used in any kind of printing process. It’s used for books, pamphlets, folders, brochures, catalogs, and direct mail advertising.

Among the notable qualities of book paper are its appearance, strength, opacity, permanency, and the fact that it can be coated. It’s composed mostly of raw wood pulp, straw, and recycled wastepaper.

There are a number of different finishes available for the uncoated variety, such as antique, eggshell, machine, English, and super-calendered. Antique has the roughest surface and the super-calendered has the smoothest and slickest finish for uncoated. For the coated book papers, they come in either a dull, matte, or glossy coat, and can be coated on either one or both sides.

Bristol

Bristol papers are a group of stiff, heavy papers which are also fairly thick. The common uses for bristol paper are for file folders, time cards, self-mailers, programs, menus, announcements, booklet covers, and similar items.

The paper is usually smooth, lint free, and sturdy enough for heavy uses. Sometimes bristol will have a rag content but they all have good writing and printing surfaces. Postcards can be printed on bristol since they can have a coated or uncoated finish. Cast-coated Bristol is used for postcards and have the best surface for printing photographs. It’s also used for menu covers and other surfaces that get handled more than normal.

Cover

Cover paper is used mostly for the outside cover of catalogs and brochures. It’s also used commonly for booklets, manuals, binders, programs, directories, self-mailers, or announcements.

Because it’s on the outside of the printed booklets, it has good resistance to handling and abrasion. It also has a good appearance, permanent color, good printability for either offset or screen printing, and can be embossed, folded, and glued if used on paperback books.

It’s usually made from a rag pulp and wood pulp combination. It comes as coated or uncoated, on one or both sides. The uncoated types can come in a wide range of finishes and textures, such as linen, leather, corduroy, and other unique textures.

When specifying coated cover, note that they often come in a cast coated finish, which gives a super hard and glossy look, much like heavy photographic paper. They also come in metallic colors or other colored coatings, but they’re usually quite expensive.

Newsprint

Newsprint is the lowest grade of paper you’ll find in printing. It’s used mainly for newspapers and phone directories. It’s not made to last long but is fairly stong considering that it can be very thin, as in phone books. It’s also noted for having a low light glare to make ready small print easier and has excellent absorption qualities for ink, but will eventually yellow if exposed to the air, and will become brittle. Because it’s used mostly for newspapers and directories, the paper is only available on rolls for large and high speed presses.

Offset

Offset papers are basically book papers that are made specifically to be printed by offset presses. It’s used for manuals, reports, form letters, ad and promotional materials, forms, and most other materials.

Like book papers, they can come in uncoated or coated varieties, including a special clay coating. They have very little lint or paper dust when printing since their very stable.

Recycled

Recycled paper is noted for having the ability to be recycled easily. Recycled paper comes from waste paper from businesses, industry, and general city waste, since most of the solid waste from cities is paper. Printing companies themselves will collect trimmings and wasted paper and generally recycle them.

In summary, it’s worth your while to get a basic understanding of paper types when you start dealing with printers. For most sizable jobs, the paper alone will make up over half your invoice. So choose wisely.

If you think so, you could be throwing away money – lots of it – without realizing it.

The reasons are simple: no company that uses direct mail for its marketing should  assume that any one printer will always be the right printer for the job. Remaining flexible enough to work with different printers should become a habit. With print production, staying vigilant, rather than totally trusting, is more useful.

It’s hard to overstate the value of your printed product to a direct mail campaign. For most projects, the cost of printing alone can absorb from 25 to 75 percent of your budget. The higher quality you want, the greater the percentage. If you find this difficult to believe, pull out your expense breakdown for your last mailing and compare the costs of printing with the total. You may be in for a surprise.

Along with cost, the quality of your end product—your finished package—is critical to the success of your campaign. No amount of excellence in the stages of the job prior to printing (i.e. design, copywriting, illustration, photography, etc.) will fully compensate for mediocre printing. For instance, the paper may be of poor quality; colors images might be out of register and affect clarity;  folds and final trims might be crooked or inaccurate; and any of these could detract from the final piece.

Yet despite these basic facts, it appears that few direct marketers devote the time or energy needed to take full control over the printing end of their project. And that’s equivalent to an architect not caring about visiting the building site during construction or understanding what’s happening if they do. As a consequence, they pay too high a price and still do not achieve all that they hoped for.

Before suggesting some remedies for the problem let’s look at a few of the causes:

Addiction. The direct mailer might be satisfied with his present printer, so there’s no apparent reason to change. Or, they’ve used a particular printer for years, so it is easiest to continue the relationship. Or, possibly the direct mail firm uses a production manager (ad manager, graphic designer, etc.) who may be too new, too busy, or unconcerned about the final cost to consider changing printers.

Sales pressure. It’s natural to assume that the greater the sales effort by the printer, the better the printer’s output will be. After all, don’t the best salespeople work for the finest printers? If you think so, you could again be making a costly generalization. The rule here is that the best salespeople work for printers who offer the best pay. But the problem is that it’s not the printer who is really paying its sales force their generous commissions—it’s you, the customer!

Ignorance. Since no printer knows everything in the world about the art of printing, it’s doubtful that the direct mailer can either. But far too few direct mail executives know enough about the printing processes to have much control, even though there’s plenty to understand.

Once you’ve found the right printer (in itself quite a task,) you should have a working knowledge of all the key stages of printing. You need to be aware of papers, ink colors, trim sizes, bindery functions, color separations, art mechanicals, and stripping—just for starters. Before the job is finished, there may be many dozens of decisions that have to be made. And each choice will affect the final cost and quality.

These three reasons—addiction to a printer, sales pressure, and ignorance—prevent direct mail managers from taking full command over their printing. What can be done?  I’ll cover some ideas for that next time.

There’s a clear difference and neither works alone in most cases. They need to work as a unit, with the end product being a creation that takes both parts. That end product might be a magazine, book, newsletter, calendar, direct mail package, or a product catalogue.

Strangely, however, most four-year graphic arts schools don’t devote much time to teaching the “production” part of the graphic arts industry. The schools may have the finest, fastest, computers with the latest software and laser or ink-jet printers. But the graduate is usually forced to learn about the tangible world of “print production” on their own – which usually means in the field. If the student is lucky, they might have had a field trip to a printing company to watch some posters being produced by the printing press. That would not be a very helpful experience, though.

It’s therefore important to avoid the simple mistake of thinking that print production is a single process: artwork gets produced and then the print production phase takes over, yeilding the end result of your printed materials.  Your role, as print buyer, therefore, is to understand and accept the fact that there are three components to print production: quality, price, and service. And of the three, quality is usually the most important, and the one I’ll focus on most in this article.

Quality, price, and service

Quality is the essential requirement for a printed piece. It also has the largest affect on the price you’ll pay — but it’s the key to choosing a satisfactory printer. The problem is learning to recognize quality from the other two variables of price and service, although they are still related.

I like to sometimes define quality as a figment of the imagination. This phantom we call “quality” will embody the expectations of the different people involved in the project.  Put these people together and you generally get many variations of the definition of quality:

the marketing manager – they hope the piece will succeed in helping to sell the company’s products or services. For some managers the results will speak for themselves. Since print production for most companies is not a necessity, but an investment, the return on this investment is what counts. For example, no business wants to spend $10,000 to print and mail a flier and get only $5,000 in sales profit as a result.

the graphic designer – is more focused on the printed piece as a work of art: the visual, tactile, intellectual, and emotional effect on the reader.  A good designer will spend hours discussing the end purpose of a printed piece with the client before putting together some ideas (or “dummies.)  They’ll go over the products, services, copy, illustrations, end-users, and web site compatibility.  As they input all this data into their mind, they will try to imagine some good designs and present them to you.

the copywriter – is interested in whether their message will be communicated well and whether it will drive the readers to action. There is often a built-in conflict between copywriters and graphic designers as to how words should look on the page: best layout, headings, subheads, bolding and italics, typeface and fonts (typography,) and always the amount of copy. For instance, an 8 1/2″ x 11″ hand-out will only allow for so many words to be practical, and with photos, logos, illustrations, etc, they will be forced to compromise.

the illustrators and photographers – they always hope their images will be worth at least a thousand words. Of course not all products or services are easily described with images and a lot of creativity is required to enhance the overall impression. For example, how does one sell perfume with a photograph? What kind of logo will work for a perfume called “Endure?”   Photography and illustration are both art forms and working with their professionals is like working with any artist. There will naturally be different opinions of which photo is best, where to crop it, how large to print it, where to place it on the page, and the captions.

the printer – from the viewpoint of the printer themself, quality is usually 100% tangible, and depends on using all five senses. Some of the things they look at are the quality and weight of paper, clarity of all text and illustrations, correct colors throughout, dot resolution of images for sharpness, alignment on the paper, and precision bindery work. Even the nicest brochure becomes defective if the folding or cutting is off even a fraction of an inch. The most expensive book or magazine becomes no more than recycled paper if any of the pages are upside down or out of sequence.

I hope that explains what I meant by saying quality is often a figment of the imagination.

As mentioned in part two, the sales rep for the printer should be giving you samples of work they have produced similar to what you need. But if you’re producing a particular kind of piece, such as a catalog, and the printer you’re considering using already specializes in catalogs, then you have less to worry about. You know they have the right kind of equipment. That would help you focus on other issues, such as their cost estimate and turnaround time.

But if the printer handles a wide range of job types, then the equipment they use becomes a more important factor in your decisions. For example, if the printer uses primarily higher-speed web presses (using paper off a roll,) you will get faster delivery and lower cost, but the quality will also be lower. That’s partly because on slower, sheet-fed presses, the pressman has an easier time keeping an eye on the sheets as they come off the press, and that allows for more precise and quicker adjustments. On extra high quality jobs, such as annual reports or short-run books with detailed photos, today’s sheet-fed presses usually have more computerized adjustment capabilities.

The same quality control factors are relevant when it comes to bindery equipment. Since bindery equipment requires a lot of floor space and is expensive, many printers farm out much of their bindery work. This can sometimes affect the price and turnaround time. When my company printed workplace posters, for example, the printer had to send them to a bindery that had specialized laminating equipment, not just for the larger sheet size but to meet our unique lamination specifications. That allowed us to boast that our posters were washable and practically indestructible.

The above are just some of the possible connections between printing equipment and the quality you’ll receive of your printed materials. Therefore, the more you learn about the equipment your printer has and how well it fits your needs, they finer control you’ll have over quality.