How to Know When You Need a Professional Printer

By: charen


If you are a new business owner, or you’re looking to save a few bucks in your marketing budget you may want to consider creating and printing some of your own marketing materials. With desktop publishing applications and quality ink-jet printers on the market today, you can do many things that before were regulated to a professional commercial printing shop.

Here’s a short guide to what marketing or advertising items you can print yourself, and what you should leave to your local commercial printing press to print for you. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.

Home Printing Items

Business cards. You can design your own business cards on many applications on your personal computer. Two popular software options are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office Publisher. Publisher has many templates for business cards with eye-catching designs. You can design your own card in Word or Publisher and buy business card stock, with the business card stock already perforated for you to just peel apart after you’ve printed them. Both programs also have a printing option set for the special business card stock.

Brochures. Most brochures are designed as either bi-fold, with one fold and four sides for your information, or tri-fold, with two folds and six sides for your information. You’ll need to decide how much information you want to include in your brochure and how many photos. This will help you decide which size of brochure you need. Again, Microsoft Publisher or any other kind of “print shop” software will have templates you can use. You can buy brochure paper that is already creased so that they fold nicely.

One color flyers. Flyers are the easiest marketing material to create on your computer. These are just one page ads that are on the common 8.5 x 11-inch size, which you should already have. Of course, buying thicker paper or colored paper will make your flyers really stand out.

Professional Printing Items

Four color flyers. You can produce one-color flyers or black-and-white flyers at home, but it’s best to leave the four color printing to the professionals. Their larger printers can produce better saturated colors, which works especially well if you have a photo on your flyer. Plus, printing in color takes time. Your one desktop printer can take hours longer than a professional printer will to print out anything in color.

Billboards. This one is pretty obvious. You would need a huge printer to print billboard-size posters. Plus, billboards are generally printed on vinyl, which hold the color longer against all the outdoor elements.

Greeting cards. Sending unprofessional greeting cards make your business look unprofessional. Greeting cards can be an important piece of your marketing plan. Sending nice cards on birthdays and holidays to your customers shows you care. Greeting cards generally need excellent color printing equipment because they include a lot of photos and color.

Large posters. Professional printers have the card stock and the equipment necessary to create professional posters. If you’re going to a conference or a trade show, posters are not something you want to skimp on.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit: Color Printing