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| Oops, not quite right |
We certainly use a lot of paper here at HawkGerber…and then we use it again. You see, there are several steps required for many of our designs, especially the ones with more than one color. Once one color has been letterpress printed and the paper has dried, we need to set up the press for another color on the same image. This can get tricky…
Re-gis-ter (rej-uh-ster) noun : correct relation or exact superimposition, as of colors in color printing.
When setting up a second polymer plate to print another color, we must be sure that the registration is very nearly perfect on many of our designs. This can be very challenging since even just having that second color be off by a micron, the image will be poor quality.
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| This one was printed on a previous test page. |
Re-use (ri-yoos) verb : the recovery of materials and products for the same or a similar end use.
While we’d like to claim that every print job is perfectly printed and registered from the start, that’s not always the case. Alright, well it’s never the case. We must run several test pages to measure, eyeball and jerry-rig to ensure proper registration. On a simple design, this may only take a few test print pages. More complex designs can be, well, more complex. Often there are multiple pages wasted as we experiment during the registration process. In order to be economical and ecological, we reuse pages that have been printed on previously. Most of our test pages have been printed on as much as 4-8 times before being tossed.
Re-duce (ri-doos) verb : to bring down to a smaller extent, size, amount, number.
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| Now thats more like it. |
By doing this in conjunction with using environmentally friendly papers, we hope to reduce the amount of paper wasted and the effect on the environment.