Designing & Printing Postcards Online

Video Transcript

"In this clip, we're going to talk about printing your post cards on-line...Designing and Printing On-line. So, if you have a project and you're thinking: "I need to get this printed. Where am I going to go?" When you go on-line, there's a few things you need to look at when you're comparing the different printers, and ideally, what you do is start and say "this is the size I'm thinking about," but don't start working on your project until you found your printer, and so what you would do is go and find the printer and look at what sizes they have available because what they're doing is printing in bulk so they're running a large suite where they're running many peoples jobs at the same time and so your jobs is just one of the jobs they're going to be running in that print run. So they have set sizes how they do everything. So what you want to do is look at the sizes they have available and work backwards from there. Design your project to fit into their sizes and that way you'll get the best deal on your postcard printing. The other thing is, the next thing to think about is the paper weight. The standard paper weight is twelve-point and that's what, generally, most of the companies are going to offer you, is a twelve-point and that's, that's a good size. It's a nice weight and it will go through the mail. It's not too heavy and it's not too, it's definitely a postcard, but it's not too, it's not too thin, so that's a good weight, is twelve-point. The next thing is finish. They're going to offer you a gloss finish or an uncoated finish, and a gloss coating is very shiny. It's something like this where you have a UV coating and this is great if you're doing something where you want the flyer or your postcard to have some it have some, it lasts longer, like it doesn't, it won't get bent up as quickly because it has this coating to protect it. But, if you're going to try and write on it, it makes it difficult. So, if you want to try to write, if you're going to address your postcard, or you want to make notes on them, or they're anything like that, then you'd want to go with an uncoated stock. The next thing you're going to see when you look at on-line printers, is they're going to have you're, they're going to say four over four versus four over zero, or four over one, and what that means is that's four, four represents four colors, which is the four colors that are on a printing press, C M Y K. So, four means full color. So, full color, four over four would be full color on the front and the back of the postcard, like this. This is four over four. Four over one is going to be a card like this where you have full color on the front, but just black ink on the back. That's four over one, and four over zero is going to be where you have full color on the front, and then nothing. It's just blank on the back. Now, the next thing that, after you've gone through the weight, the finish, the printing, the last thing is what kind of finishing do you want. Are you going to want...and one thing that a lot of them offer is corner roundering, corner rounding, which is, this card is have the corners rounded. It's a nice touch. Sometimes if you just want to make things a little different, maybe it goes with your image if you have more circular images, or if you're gonna, people are going to hold it, be holding it. The corner rounding is nice, but generally, it's not necessary. It's just an extra thing, but that's what they'll talk about in, when you look at their ordering sites, and the last thing to think about is the turn-around because you have three things. You're going to have your printing time that it takes to get the job printed. You're going to have the proofing time, because if you really require proof, they'll either, sometimes they can send you a proof that you'll see as a .PDF, but many times, if you require, if it's a large job, you require a printed proof, they'll have to overnight you a printed proof. So, it may take, from the time that you submit your files, it may take them a day or two to produce a proof that they would then overnight to you, you would approve or make changes on and then overnight back to them, and then the other thing is then you have your printing time and then the very last thing is shipping time. So, you know, you may look at these, at many sites and they'll say "twenty-four hour turn-around." Well, it depends on what part of that they're talking about. Generally, they can print in twenty-four hours, but it depends on if you need to see a proof and where you're shipping to, so you need to add those things onto your time frame when you're looking at the big picture. So those are the things to think about when you're printing a postcard on-line."