Print design is our specialty.
Printing terminology can be confusing to those new to it, so a short guide follows on how the printing process works.
It is intended to give a brief introduction to what goes on behind the scenes when printing a document.

Most printed paper and card work is done using Offset Lithography which is a process little changed since it was originated two hundred years ago. The design is first transferred to a printing plate.
The plate, and lithography in general, uses the principles of oil repelling water to create the print. The area where the image is allows the watery ink to stick to it whereas the non-image areas displace the ink.

Offset means the plate transfers the ink to a rubber drum which then lays the ink onto the page. There are many benefits in doing this, the two main reasons are better image quality and the plates don't need to be made as reverse images.

Plates and inks
A plate needs to be made for each colour required.
A standard full-colour page is referred to as 4-colour. These colours are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, most often known as CMYK.
It is similar to primary colours used when you were at school playing with poster paints. We all know red mixed with yellow makes orange. Printing is slightly different in that magenta mixed with yellow makes red (technically they are not mixed but overlaid on top of each other) but the principle is the same.

Cyan, magenta and yellow together do not make black but a rather dirty dark brown so a black ink is added. Black has its own rules however, but before we go into this let's mention Separations.

Separations
Separations are the page split into their component colours for making the printing plates. These separations are grayscale and the amount of ink are typically referred to in percentages.
As an example we'll take the red mix as referred to above.
Let us say we have a red box with some white text in the middle. When separated the C(yan) plate would be empty, as is the (blac)K. The M(agenta) and Y(ellow) plates will have a black square, known as 100%, with the text as white in the middle (again technically it is not white, it is the substrate colour, an absence of ink. 0%). This is known as reversed out.
Now, back to the black ink. If you use just the black ink on its own the outcome is a rather dull dark grey. To combat this other colours are added. This is called Rich Black. You cannot overlay 100% of the other 3 colours with the black ink as this will over saturate the page with ink causing untold problems. So careful attention needs to be paid to mixing the inks and creating the colours.

Special inks
Sometimes a company will have a special colour they wish to use. These are usually based on the Pantone colour reference system. Pantone colours are chosen from a swatch book similar to when you choose a paint from the list of colours found at the DIY store. The Pantone swatch will have various information about the colour such as a unique code and the percentages of each of the four standard colours needed if you wish to recreate it using the 4-colour process. When using four colours to create the Pantone shade there can be variations in tone. If you want to use this colour as a specific ink another plate would need to made in addition to the other four.
A job like this would be called a 5-colour job, or even a 6 or 7-colour job if more are used.
This will increase the cost of the print.
So why use these colours? Apart from the consistency in colour it can allow you to have a single colour print job using a colour that is not one of the four standard inks. This requires only one plate and so is cheaper.
Other things like spot varnishes can also need more plates.

Costs
The expensive part of Litho are the setup costs. Plates need to be made and then fixed to the press and then aligned.
As we have already discussed, four plates are needed for a full colour job but that is not the end of the story.
If you have an A4 sized catalogue you can fit 16 pages on an SRA0 sheet of paper (SRA0 is a little bigger than A0 to allow for crop marks which show where to cut the paper). This only prints one side of the paper.
If you have 16 page (a page in this instance means a single printed side) catalogue you can run it through the press then flip the paper, turn it around and run it through again. This is known as work and turn.
More pages may mean more plates.
There is a flip side to this: economies of scale. As most of the cost is in the setup there is not a great cost difference between 2000 and 10000 units.
If a shorter run is needed you can go for a digital print. The unit costs are higher than that of litho but if you only need 50 copies it can be more cost-effective.