What is Commercial Printing?

It is but common to all professional printed material...

Gone are the days of the old-fashioned printing press; but there is no doubt that the printer - the kind that is always used in connection with computers - continues to be used the masses. But if you are writing material which are you are truly looking to "sell" (i.e. for money) it is wise to refer to one of many commercial printing tutorials available on the Internet and surely elsewhere. "Commercial printing" itself is a step beyond desktop printing - one requires the services of a service bureau and / or commercial printer together with commercial printing processes including offset printing. It is of course up to the writer to be familiar with the subject matter being written about, but (proper) commercial printing has its own vocabulary, just like so many other things in life: take your time perusing definitions of "file preparation", "separations" and "finishing", for example.

In practice, a lot of people agree that the most common example of digital printing involves the use of a desktop Inkjet printer - but if you are seeking larger quantities and even better quality, you can turn to commercial digital printing: with Inkjet, laser or other methods. Digital printing furthermore offers cost-effective print-on-demand and variable data printing.

All printed material starts off with an idea, right through to a design and a final printout. And whether yours is direct mail, a billboard, a company brochure, business cards or whatever else, and no matter what the paper size, paper thickness, colours and creative marketing materials, the main thing you need to know is that commercial printing is all about taking art work and transferring that work onto a piece of paper or card stock. In practice, a lot of companies use a kind of offset printing to transfer four sets of colour - cyan, magenta, yellow and black, or CMYK.

The process is really quite simple; and it has not truly changed over 100 years. It all begins with an aluminum plate being created from the artwork, always representing one colour from the cyan-magenta-yellow-black list. One wraps the plate around a plate cylinder which allows ink to fill up the cut out shape of the aluminum plate. After ink is poured into the cutout it is transferred to a rubber roller that is referred to as the blanket cylinder; which is used to let the paper roll within while retrieving the right level of ink. There are four presses - one for each of the colours in question. The paper moves through each press absorbing each colour one at a time before being dried in an area of inferred heat.