Studio Brief 1 - Chat With James The Print Man

So following on from my blog post about asking the peers in my class whether or not i should have my leaflet in black & white or colour I decided to head down into the print room and ask James who runs the print room he's thoughts on printing in full colour vs black and white.

I started of by asking him whether or not i could print directly onto coloured stock. He's answer was no as the stock i wanted to use (dark blue) would be to dark and the ink would just soak into the paper and wouldn't be visible. He told me of different methods i could try like screen printing and buying my own printer and using custom inks. This would mean buying refillable ink cartridges and filling them up with custom inks but this would mean more time being taken up which becomes an issue due to the brief only being a week long.

After this I ask James if a full colour print would look presentable or whether or not the blue will crack once folded. He assured me that the paper wouldn't crack as much if i went with a thinner stock as it mainly occurs with thicker stock. On that note i decided to print my leaflet in black and white and in full colour. The leaflet was printed on A3 and the stock was around 150 gsm (i may have forgot the gsm), white gloss, the stock also felt like the same paper leaflets are generally printed on.

Below are the outcome of the print session:

As you can see the blue didn't crack as much as i was expecting, which was a great result. From this point i went back into the class and asked people if they preferred the black & white or the full colour. 100% said they liked the full colour one best and i also thought so too. Therefore, i will be sticking with the full colour leaflet instead of the black & white version.