A Complete Description About Offset Printing Steps
Here, we want to give a complete description of offset printing steps. The printing industry is considered as one of the most important industries and is in great demand and many people are looking to order these industries. By appearing changes in the world, its requirement has not only decreased but also dramatically increased.
Attempts have been made to completely explain the offset printing steps. In Iran and in comparison to the whole world, the printing technology has not grown significantly and despite the emergence of modern printing machines, the required skills have not been acquired in this field and many operators can control these machines as if they had the same performance as the old ones and they never use the facilities embedded in.
In this study, we are about to briefly describe the printing process. Certainly, you are enthusiastic to get more information about what processes your order goes through when you place an order.
An order needs three sections to be prepared: 1. the initial steps, 2. the printing steps, 3. the post-printing steps and these three sections have several steps as well.
Initial Printing Steps
Material preparation:
After taking the order, all the requirements of that order must be supplied, which includes all the suggested sources, design and text. All these requirements must be compared. Then, these requirements are prioritized based on the basic requirements. Some ideas can not be drawn on the paper and it is better to ignore such ideas.
Paper is considered as the main material and requirement of the order and it is required to consider it from the beginning and if it is not available in the printing house, it should be prepared. It is better to always maintain different types of paper in the printing house because it is sometimes required to use special papers and these types of paper are hard to find in the market.
Designing Department
In the designing department, the designer or designing department should be asked to provide the required printing files in addition to the required designs. It should be noted that the selection of experts is very important in this department. Skills and expertise is very important for doing design works and if a mistake happens in this department and in the design, the printing house will suffer a lot of losses.
After designing, the output file should contain all the standards required for printing. Before sending the designed file to other departments, the designer should consider the conditions and prepare the file according to the requirements. The designer has to consider the type of paper and the spacing existed in the papers. In the meantime, the direction of printing and the cutting method should also be considered.
Mold Manufacturing
Some products like boxes require special cuts and before cutting, the desired mold should be designed and manufactured. The mold is designed in the designing department and after designing the file, it is sent to the mold manufacturing department. The mold manufacturing can be obtained by means of wooden or metal blades and in the letterpress printing, the blades are performed on the printed papers.
Printing Steps
At this step, ready-to-print files are sent to the lithography center by the design department in order to print. Lithography is considered as the connecting section of the product resulting from the designing and printing departments. Therefore, in the lithography department, the files obtained from the designing department are printed on the special metal plates called zinc plates. In the printing house, these papers are used to perform the printing process.
Generally, printing is performed using the four main colors of blue, red, yellow and black and the combination of these colors creates more colors used in the printing projects. Other inks used in the printing industry are separately or can be combined. Each color used in the printing industry is called a color channel.
According to the number of color channels, lithography should seek to prepare zinc plates and send them to the printing house. Such papers are obtained by means of the file obtained from the designing department. Therefore, the preparation of these files is very important in the design department and should contain the required standards.
Printing House
The printing house is definitely familiar to those who read this text. When printing the ideas, it is better to be careful in choosing the printing house. The selected printing house should contain the advanced technologies, specialized workforce, accurate delivery schedule and most importantly, high quality.
The printing is performed using many devices and methods. But if you need to print ideas according to the required standards and quality, it is necessary to be extremely obsessive in choosing a printing house.
Post-Printing Steps
UV and cellophane coatings:
After the printing step and depending on the type of order and the steps required in the post-printing step, it is required to get more helps from different departments in order to prepare the order. One of post-printing steps is the UV or cellophane centers and these two centers are two separate ones. Based on the type of order, it is possible to determine which one the project needs.
In this step, selecting the type of cover is considered by the employer. We should select the department with high quality raw materials. Using UV inks made by an unknown company can cause the separation of the UV printing from the paper exactly after several hours.
Folding and Arranging
This department is responsible for folding the product obtained from above steps which is done based on the employer requirements and if necessary, they are arranged and prepared for the binding department and this is more useful for printing magazines, etc. In the folding department, it is necessary to use special devices for folding and arranging and the more accurately this is done, the higher the quality of the work will increase.
Binding
After the above-mentioned steps, the binding department is responsible for gluing the cover and papers together and punching them. In this department, using high quality stapler and adhesives is very important and if the low-quality materials are used, the final product will soon be separated in addition to having low quality.
Letterpress Printing
This machine creates special cuts on the paper and therefore, the molds named stencils are used. For performing any kinds of work, it is first required to design its own mold. If the mold has defects, it will cause the final product with insufficient quality.
Box Building
In this department, the molded boxes are built and therefore, it is required to precisely monitor this department. All the printing steps may be performed carefully, but the last step i.e. the box building department can have some problems. In such a situation, after completing all the steps, a work with lower quality is obtained and it is required to perform the steps from the beginning and such a thing can be time consuming and cause significant financial losses.
Packaging and Delivering Step
After completing all the mentioned steps, the product needs to be packaged and delivered to the customer.
In addition to being costly, the packaging and delivering step have its own concerns because the product can be damaged.
Finally, it should be noted that Zomorod Printing Complex tries to deliver you a high quality product by considering all the required preparation sensitivities and using modern printing machines.
Author 