How we do it

The big question… Why?

15 April 2023 Stuart Nimmo Customer Service, Marketing, Power of Print

In an age where buzzwords and rhetoric spin around endlessly. Falsities around being kind to the environment by using electronic communications bluff their way into everyday life. Why does print or physical marketing matter?

We exist to provide the following

• enable successful businesses/organizations to engage with effective physical touchpoints
• assist SMEs / charities to deliver effective physical branding to enforce their presence in their primary customer touchpoints
• enable more accountable communications with known carbon footprint materials

What drives us… in a physical world, where being seen is a significant challenge. The reality of physical provides a great opportunity to help SMEs and third-sector organizations to create reality, and retention whilst resonating with an audience in a meaningful way.

The power of print, aka physical marketing, lies in the ability to connect. Connections are created through, the impact of the message; evoking the senses, visual and touch. Print through its lesser utilization due to mass market digital communications being cheap and overused, means print holds a unique power of trust, and reality, there at the moment, with no distractions. When coupled with creativity in a proper design, and well-written content, it has leverage in a very different way. Add in personalized or localized to make the message even more relevant to the recipient, and the engagement level increases further.

As a multi-disciplinary print provider, we don’t just print on paper, but everything through to large format items like banners and signage, through to garments and apparel. Delivering a wide range of physical items ready to take your brand. Delivery of this range of items, allows us to support our customers more fully in delivering their message, even just reminding people of who they are. Of course, this can be subliminal, working in the background.

We don’t live in silos, unlike some graphic communication providers. We know and understand the power of connecting digital communications with print. We don’t profess to be experts in digital communications, however, understand what you can do. Hence why you won’t find us selling websites, social media support or other digital products. At the heart of what we do is the power of physical media through print. We understand the paper, and the nuisances of print finishing, which allows us to better specify strong campaigns and items in print.

Don’t think we are not connected, we do understand marketing basics, we have professionals in other disciplines we love to work with. We will ask, what is your call to action? How do you want to measure or quantify parts of marketing tools? How are you distributing or connecting with people who might be your ideal audience? These aren’t hostile questions, purely us making sure you have thought through a customer journey, where are you wanting them to go next and why.

As for being accountable, we can identify sources of paper, substrates, garment stock and pretty much everything that flows through our print studio. From the shortest journeys of Kendal to Preston and us in Halifax, or paper manufactured in Portugal. With toner which is compostable, latex large format ink. We are well aware of every item we use in our processes. We’d like to challenge you to think of the carbon used in digital communications- you’ll struggle to fully identify every element or resource used.

Above all, we care about what we do, try to be properly responsible, and have some ethics along the way. Perhaps we are an exception to life in modern business society, we aim to be credible, through being responsible. We work best when in partnership with our customers, helping them to achieve whilst delivering progressive development for all involved. Making us part of the bigger community, valued and adding value where we can.

Why do we not have published pricing on this website?

10 December 2022 Stuart Nimmo

Numerous reasons, firstly we focus on doing and producing work, not perpetually updating web content. We are a small boutique artisan print house; thus, we don’t have the administrative time to process all the updates we’d need to. However, these are the current significant factors why…

In a post-Covid world our supply chains are highly volatile and not fully settling down, including paper mills and merchants seeing external pressures placing challenges on the operation of their businesses.
We all know that the cost of power and fuel has rocketed, this doesn’t just affect us, but also all our suppliers and their supply chains – eg paper mentioned above. In the last 2 years, we have seen our power costs rise by about 65%.
The recent Ukraine war and other global issues have continued to place pressures on costs, yes like you, we feel the cost of living too.
We truly treat your print project as a bespoke project. It’s in the clue how we operate a “small boutique artisan print house” totally focussed on your needs, ensuring you get what you need out of your project. Thus bespoke.
Currently, we have over 100 different paper specifications in our racking, a multitude of large format materials and a wealth of garments we pull on to produce your physical marketing collateral. So, if you work out the permutations of the variables we offer, it’s pretty incredible. They don’t all work on the same costing formulas, hence why we work bespoke.

We always endeavour to be savvy wherever possible, and occasionally source materials through alternative channels to get better rates, like you we endeavour to be careful and responsible.

Above all, how we work is “traditional” being small, artisan, and boutique, however, you chose to describe us. Being traditional, we still use technology to our advantage, we don’t pipeline your job, we actually look at and work on your job. Unlike some of the online-only offerings that just process your print project and pop out the other end.

We’ve always described ourselves in our pricing policy as honest, if it incurs time, then it needs to be applied to the job alongside materials, machine time/costs and human resources. Equally said, if we can serve you effectively through small changes in how we operate, like doing a local drop-off, we will. We will assess the best routes for delivery, whether it is by courier or post.

Ultimately as a niche print service provider, we engage, to deliver our best to meet your needs.

Old fashioned values…

14 August 2022 Stuart Nimmo

There’s not a week that goes by, where we see an example of this. So hence I will try to sanitize this in the essence rather than give examples from seen and witnessed experiences to save blushes from the offenders.

Yes, print has been around for decades and centuries…. however, it is still a craft, which needs the understanding to get the best out of it, dared I say, this is getting forgotten, mislaid and ignored.

Print exists at a point of delivery in the marketing and communications processes. It is a technical art, which requires knowledge to maximize its performance, and technical efficiencies to create stunning pieces which deliver spot on. What doesn’t help is the race to the bottom, the rising cost of materials in the current economic climate and the lack of understanding of how it works.

True story one… we have seen a set of brand guidelines from a client, rather sparse on meaningful print-related bits, or with minimal print-related colour information. The client on starting the first job mentioned minor issues with colour. We ran the job, needless to say, in different lights, eg morning, and late afternoon the colour shifted and other issues around metamerism, subject to the profile of the light hitting the page. The job returned for a reprint a few months later, picking up on the feedback, we endeavoured to work around and correct the issue. Please note, that the first printing was to their supplied artwork and colour specification breakdowns. We did get it better, however, in rectifying one issue it identified a subsequent issue, with a secondary colour when it sat alongside the key/ predominate colour. So the job returned for a third printing, this time, we ended up requesting agreed satisfactory materials (samples) with the correct colour to the client’s perspective. On cracking open the brand guideline documentation, we then realised the colour under the technical mix (CMYK) breakdowns was different than the specification labelled on it. Shock horror, fully knowing that the client wasn’t going to either care or understand, we needed a way to resolve this. So using the sample, we matched, in neutrally balanced daylight, to a Pantone colour reference guide. This determined the best colour close, which was printable. It was a colour close to the edge of the colour gamut (within the match of reliably printable within a CMYK process). Establishing this allowed us to define how we would tackle the printing of this job.

The moral of the story, is if you are having branding created, and more of it is going to be in physical form than online form, engage a designer that has proven specialisms with print, paint, and signage (all of which are within additive value colour spaces). As the online world uses subtractive colour models or RGB colour spaces. Getting colour right is so essential, understanding colour and how it works is essential to a great delivery of a brand.

True story two: Material specification. Print is wonderful for using many different materials, which provide different stimuli and receptive feelings and emotions for the end user.

However, understanding how these materials perform in a production environment is key. All because it is right for the aesthetics don’t mean it will be right for the budget of the client. The design has and always will be about how something is created for end users and what the end use achieves. Understanding the how is essential, you would not find a cast metal specialist trying to create something out of timber.

A great illustration of this is when a graphic designer specifies a laminate on a disposable giveaway item like a leaflet, equally when the leaflet is also printed on the heaviest weight board going as well. In both instances, it isn’t environmentally friendly, as the resource used for the item is purely for aesthetics only. Design is also about functionality and budget.

Another illustration is a bound job, where a non-folio stock is used as text pages within a bound job. So what is a folio stock? It is best described as a paper weight which works within a binding process. So, using a 170gsm or 200gsm stock as brochure or book leaves on a saddle stitched job, will require every section to be creased, and folded separately to prevent cracking. What is cracking? When using heavier weight stock, an indentation is made in the form of creasing or scoring the substrate to compress or control the fibres of the board in the sheet. When loosely folded, these fibres are still uncontrolled, thus they break the edge of the sheet when folded. So if you have a 20 or 28-page saddle stitched book, every 4-page section will need creasing before folding, gathering and stitching. Point to note different print methods also behave differently when it comes to print finishing. The implications generally are budgetary, as the number of processes often increases the budget. It isn’t common for bindery lines which gather stitch and trim to inline crease printed sections prior to binding. This results in hand collation before stitching, which is removing automation.

Raising on the point above, materials are at the heart of what we do as printers, we work with different substrates every day, and we understand what they will do in production. Being savvy with specifying means being savvy with your budget.

As print professionals, yes we design artwork pieces for print. However we understand you need creative input on occasions to shift the thinking and presentation, and we applaud you for it, however, bring us on your journey with you. As champagne on lemonade budgets doesn’t help if you cannot afford to properly implement the scheme.

So who am I to make these comments, with over 30 years in the trade, I’ve handled a vast range of print and moved it through to successful completion. Not only experienced but educated in print (possibly last generation with such a broad experience) so ND in graphic design, with hands-on with different processes and allied work experience whilst in education. Followed by HND in design print management, where my scope, understanding of processes, materials and working practices was homed even further. Subsequent education in the form of a C&G level 3 in photography. Also BPIF Young Manager in Print runner up in 2003.

In summary, Good design with an understanding of the process is so essential, however, coupled with relevant experience to deliver is challengingly missing from so many. Ask the right questions, see portfolios, and ask for learning points from every example, if they are purely creative, then do you want to engage that designer on your job?