For many small businesses, professional copy shops provide all the services one might find in corporate duplicating departments.

Most copy shops have extremely sophisticated equipment, including high-speed copiers that can collate and staple large jobs in a very short time. They also have color copiers, large-format copiers, and limited binding services. But they rarely provide true printing services.

Some copy shops let you rent time at their computers to print your work using their desktop printers. You can also bring your files in for output on their high-end printers. (I’ve got a great copy shop three blocks from my house where I can duplicate my files on their fancy color printers.)

Small print shops, or printing press operations, specialize in jobs for local businesses such as newsletters, brochures, invitations, stationery, labels, envelopes, menus, business forms, business cards, stickers, catalogs, and so on. In addition to traditional printing, they may also provide digital and photocopy services.

The main benefit of working with a local print shop as opposed to a national commercial print shop (covered in the following section) is that it’s very easy to check on the status of your work and make adjustments, by looking at an advance copy that’s called a proof. You can also save money on shipping costs when you deal with a local print shop.

National print shops are the mammoth printing companies that reproduce national magazines, books, packaging, sales brochures, or annual reports for major corporations all over the world. Most of these companies offer only traditional or digital printing on large presses.

In order to work with these organizations, you should be prepared to allot extra time to ship your files and proofs back and forth between you and the main print headquarters. Occasionally a print shop will ask a designer or production manager to visit the print shop on a press check. A press check means that you’ll be shown samples of the job at different stages of the printing. You can then approve the print or ask the shop to adjust the colors.

Using a national shop may cost you extra in shipping charges or the cost of traveling to the press check.

Books, clothes, and music aren’t the only things you can buy on the Web. Many print shops have Web sites where you can send in orders for business cards, postcards, brochures, and other print jobs.

Some of these online services offer barebones services without the opportunity to see proofs. Others offer Web images that you can use to proof your work. Still others will send you a hard-copy proof that you can approve or make changes to.

I like online printing services for jobs where I’m not concerned about matching exact colors. My business cards as well as some promotional postcards have been printed using online services.

However, I wouldn’t want to use one of these services if I were concerned about the type of paper or matching colors. For example, suppose you were the designer working on a brochure for a winery. You wouldn’t want the image of a glass of bordeaux to end up looking like a burgundy. In that situation, I would choose a press that would let me proof the job as it was coming off the press.

Letterpress is the oldest form of printing. Letterpress starts with a piece of metal, called a plate, that contains the image to be printed. Or instead of one solid plate, there might be a collection of smaller pieces, such as individual letters or illustrations made of metal, or perhaps large letters made of wood, grouped together into a block. The area that prints is raised above the non-printing areas. Inked rollers run across the plate, transferring the ink to the raised surfaces only. The paper is then pressed onto the inked plate.

The images created by letterpress printing can be crisp and sharp. It’s a wonderfully tactile form of printing because on the finished piece you can feel the indentations in the paper made by the metal characters. However, if you look closely at the edges of letterpress printing you might see a slight area around the edge of the image where the ink is a bit heavier.

Although it once was the most popular (and for many years, the only) form of printing, letterpress is rarely used today for commercial work. It has evolved into a beautiful art form practiced by passionate typographers and printers working on hand-bound and limited editions.

Flexography uses the same principle as letterpress in that the printing image is raised above the rest of the area. However, as the name suggests, flexography uses flexible rubber or polymer plates that can conform to uneven surfaces. This has made flexography an extremely useful process. It was originally used for printing on paper bags, corrugated boxes, and other packaging material, but its fast-drying inks make it ideal for printing on slick surfaces such as plastic grocery bags, milk cartons, and even shower curtains. As the technology behind flexography has improved, it has been used to print newspaper and magazines.

Recently flexographic printing has become even more popular because of its environmental considerations: Unlike the oil-based inks used in other types of printing, flexography uses environmentally friendly water-based inks or non-solvent inks.

Gravure printing uses a method that is the reverse of letterpress. In gravure printing the image area is recessed into a copper cylinder plate. Ink is held inside the recesses of the plate. The paper quickly and lightly presses against the plate and the ink is transferred from the recesses onto the paper.

Gravure printing is excellent for photographs. However, the time and expense needed to create the cylinder makes it economical only for long-run jobs. Many catalogs, magazines, and newspaper supplements are printed using gravure printing presses.

Steel-die engraving is a type of gravure printing where slightly wet paper is forced against the recessed plate. The pressure against the plate forces the ink from the recessed areas onto the paper. This pressure also raises the image slightly, which gives the characteristic look and feel of engraved invitations, wedding announcements, stock certificates, letterheads, and money.

The thermography process creates an even greater raised effect than engraving but it’s faster and cheaper, which is why it’s also called “poor man’s engraving.” In thermography, special powder is added to the wet ink on the surface of the paper. The combination of ink and powder is then passed under heat, hence the name thermography. Under the heat, the powder and ink are fused together and they swell to create a raised effect.

Many shops that print stationery and business cards can print using thermography, if you request it. I particularly like the old-time feel of thermography for business cards, but it’s limited to artwork without screens or photographs. (For more about screens see Chapter 6.)

This is the most popular of the different printing processes and is sometimes just called offset, lithography, or litho offset. Offset lithography uses a chemical process in which the image areas of the metal plate are made to attract grease or oil, and the non-image areas of the plate are made to attract water. Water rollers coat the non-image areas with water; ink rollers coat the image areas with oil-based ink. Because water and oil don’t mix, the image areas keep the ink in place. The ink is then transferred, or offset, onto the paper.

Most small print shops use offset printing presses as well as the large commercial operations. Offset printed pieces are recognized by a smooth edge to the text and images, and there is no indentation of the paper or raising of the ink.

I still call this by its older name, silkscreen printing from when I went to summer camp and did my own silkscreen printing. Screen printing uses a fine mesh screen made from stainless steel or from fabric such as silk or polyester. I used a silk cloth. The screen is mounted on a frame that sits on top of the material that’s to be printed. Areas of the screen that are not to be printed are blocked out as with a stencil.

I cut my own stencils in summer camp by hand which meant they had to be very simple. Today there are photographic and chemical processes that make screen printing a lot faster and more precise. A squeegee is used to force ink through the open areas of the stencil onto the material.

The big advantage to screen printing is that you can print any surface, which makes it extremely useful for banners, posters, t-shirts, CDs, etc. Back in my summer camp, I created a very primitive t-shirt and a headscarf.

An example of how a squeegee presses ink into a screen for screen printing.

You should talk to the shop that will be printing your job before you spend too much time working on graphics for screen printing. For instance, ordinary screen printing is not recommended for printing photographs or small text because those graphics lose detail as the ink passes through the mesh screen. You also may need to specify colors differently when preparing graphics for screen printing.

If you want to print photographic artwork onto fabrics, there are special photo emulsion papers that allow screen printers to transfer intricate graphics or photographs onto screens for printing. When screen printing is used to create fine art prints, it’s called serigraphy.

All the previously mentioned forms of printing use halftone screens to reproduce photographs, illustrations, or tints of color. These screens are series of dots in varying sizes that make image areas appear darker or lighter. (For more information on halftone screens, see Chapter 6.) But collotype printing uses special photogelatin plates to print without halftone dots so the images look more like photography. This screenless printing provides better control over tints, blends, and the midtones of photographs. Collotype is expensive and slow, so it’s used for limited print runs such as specialized posters.

One of the newest advances in printing technology is digital printing. Some digital printers use the same technology as photocopiers; others use combinations of lasers that make the plates and conventional offset printing.

Digital printing is ideal for short runs of full-color jobs that need to be printed quickly. Digital printing also makes it easy to change elements of the job. For instance, you could have one address in a brochure that goes to the south and another address for the north. But digital printing tends to be priced like photocopying (it doesn’t get cheaper per unit when you make more), so for large runs it may be more economical to use traditional printing.

Direct-to-plate is also called computer-to-plate (CTP). CTP isn’t really a printing process—it’s a way of shortcutting the traditional printing process.

Most printing involves making some kind of “plate” onto which text and graphics are depicted. Ink is applied to the plate, which is transferred from the plate to the paper during the printing process. This plate can be made of metal, stiff board, rubber, or other materials. But first, to make the plate, the operator needs to expose pages onto negative film. In the direct-to-plate method, he can skip the film step. Instead of creating film with an imagesetter, the direct-to-plate printer creates the actual plate used for printing.

The main advantages of direct-to-plate printing are the savings in film cost and time. However, high-end color jobs don’t always lend themselves to direct-to-plate printing.

Be prepared for your appointment with the printing sales representative. Here are some of the things you should know about your project before you meet with the printer.