Connections
Scrapbooking with the Right Paper Cutter
Scrapbooking is a great hobby. It’s creative, relaxing, and sometimes social. Most importantly, it’s a process that creates a tangible record of our lives. So, whether you’re making a scrapbook of your wedding, or a chronicle of the last 40 years, you’ll want tools to do the job right. The first essential tool is a quality precision paper cutter.
Roll With It
You’re investing in this hobby, right? Printing quality pictures, buying different paper and accessories, special pens, and those little thingies that hold the pictures to the paper. The last thing you want is to ruin a picture of Great Aunt Ruth with a dull paper cutter. And, you would hate to waste a piece of that pricey acid-free paper with a mis-measured cut.
I’ve seen the cutters you can get through the scrapbooking club. They’re tiny! There are others available at hobby stores that use a little razor like blade, that dull after just one creative session. To do this right, and to save money, you need a rotary cutter.
Good rotary cutters slide effortlessly on a rail system. The blade depth is adjustable and it’s sharp enough to cut through not just paper, but newsprint, cardboard, plastic films, vellum, aluminum foil, vinyl, and whatever else your creative brain comes up with. And, you don’t just need a sharp blade, you need one that stays sharp (without costly replacements), yet safe enough to have in a house with kids. Plus, your rotary cutter needs to be big enough to hold your project, and should include measurement guides to reference.
You’re creating something to be enjoyed by generations of people in your family. Don’t waste money on something that won’t last, and may ruin parts of your project. Invest in a quality rotary cutter from Lloyds of Indiana to get the job done right every time.
Which Cutter is Best?
Whether in the classroom, the office or the studio, every workspace needs a paper cutter. Scissors just can’t compete with the clean, perfectly straight cut of a quality paper cutter. These tools come in two flavors, and it’s important to know the advantages of each before making a purchase.
Marie Antoinette Was NOT a Fan
You don’t have to be a French Revolutionary to enjoy a good guillotine cut. The guillotine cutter has one long blade arm that is pulled down to make a cut through stacks of paper. These are great if you’re cutting stacks of newsletters, invitations, postcards, placecards, pamphlets, reply devices, or handouts. Because these use heavy-duty blades, they are also typically a heavier unit for stability. They’re often equipped with a tabletop measurement guide clearly marked, and typical cuts are outlined on the surface. One of our models will cut up to 360 sheets of 20# paper in a single stroke.
Make a Precision Slice
If you need to make a precise cut, but you’re not worried about cutting stacks of paper, then a rotary cutter is your best bet. Artists and model builders use these, as well as scrapbookers, photographers, and teachers. The rolling wheel blade is sharp, safe and glides easily over your project on a sliding rail. What you don’t want is the cheaper knock-off version of a rotary cutter. These use a razor-like blade that dulls quickly and works poorly on anything but standard stock paper. Forget cutting photos, artist quality paper, or cardstock.
Most rotary cutter models come with a measurement guide on the surface and the side, plus an adjustable depth guide to help you align your project with precision. You’ll set the transparent clamping bar to hold your trimming material in place and allow you to monitor the trimming process. Then, twin sliding poles will guide your blade with comfort and accuracy. It’s pretty quick and always precise.
Check out Lloyd’s selection of paper cutters and see which one is for you.
4 Ways Restaurants Can Use New Printing Technology
Restaurants are always looking for a way to stand out from the crowd. Once you get people in the door, how can you enhance their experience so they want to return again and again? We’re assuming the food is already great, so what can you do to in the print world to improve your image and enhance your reputation?
There are some new printing technologies that can make you stand out from the crowd. Here are a few we can recommend:
1. Variable Data Direct Mail Postcards
Only a few restaurants take advantage of direct mail, so the ones that do stand out from the crowd. Purchase a “radius mailing list” of all residential addresses within 3 miles of your restaurant. Or if you’re attracting a lunch crowd, get the list of business addresses within the same radius. You can get more specific, and identify households with children, or with single people, people who make a certain income, etc. Then, create specific offers to the different types of households. The variable data technology will let you print each offer for each type of household: the homes with children get the “free children’s meals on Tuesday” offer, and the businesses get the “free soft drinks for parties of 4 or more” offer. Thanks to variable data printing, these can even happen on the same run, which cuts down on your printing time.
2. UV Coated Business Cards
UV coated business cards are all the rage among entrepreneurs and small business owners. The cards are ultra-glossy, thicker, and the colors pop. They’re not expensive, they only seem like it. Use these cards for special “manager-only offers. Hand them out to friends and regulars, and invite people to share them. Give them to event planners and business owners who need a place for their corporate lunches, meetings, and special events. The printing process is done by a machine right after the cards have been printed. This way, everything happens at once, which makes the process easier.
3. Frequently Update Menus
Some restaurants have had the same menu for years, and others update their menus every day. What do you do if you only change your menu every season, or even every month? You could go to a special menu printing company, or you could go to their supplier and work with someone who can get you a better price. Just create your menu, or work with a graphic designer, update it as needed, and send the print file off to your trusted printer. They’ll print the pages, and cut them to size for you. And with today’s digital printing technology — the same kind we used for the direct mail postcards — you can update your menus as often as you’d like for a reasonable price.
4. UV Coated Menus
I really like the menus that are UV coated, rather than laminated or stuck in the menu pockets. They’re thinner, less bulky, and just seem more simple, attractive, and elegant. And believe it or not, they’re not that expensive. The same technology that’s used for the UV coated cards is used for these UV coated menus. It just happens during the printing process, so it doesn’t cost a lot or add a delay in production time. So they stand up to spills, don’t get easily bent or dog-eared, and can last a good long time.
Don’t Forget Your Margins – A Graphic Designers Primer on Bindery
As more graphic designers are being trained for web production instead of print, they tend to forget the small details, like setting proper margins when they’re creating print jobs that are going to be bound.
Most designers usually only make this mistake once, and then the lesson is remembered forever. But it can still be an expensive mistake to make, if you don’t have someone who catches it before the job prints, or if you have to do an expensive reprint.
Before you start, be sure you use the proper margin settings. When you setting up a new document in your page layout program, be sure you select the option that lets you set inside and outside margins, not left and right margins. You use left and right margins if you’re printing one-sided sheets, like a typical report. You should be able to select double-sided as a layout option, which should then activate the Inside/Outisde layout option.
Here are a few important points to keep in mind, based on the different bindery options.
- Saddle stitch: This is the typical staple-in-the-center bindery method. While you don’t lose a lot of interior space, you will lose a little on the outside. That’s because when you stack several folded sheets together, you start to get a fanning effect, where the innermost pages stick out beyond the front cover. When this happens, the pages have to be face cut, and you can lose as much as .25 inches off the outside margin. Talk to your printer and see what they recommend.
- Perfect Binding: Your typical book binding. Most book publishers want a 1.5″ margin for an inside margin. Take a look at a book, and see how much you’re able to see on the pages in the middle. As you get further into the book, the pages are harder to open, which means you need some extra white space. Some trade paperbacks, like the Dummies series
- Comb, Coil, Spiral, and Wire binding: These books are made to lay flat, unlike perfect bound books. It’s like laying two stacks of paper side by side, with about a .25 inch gap between them. Because of this, graphics should not cross pages. That is, don’t create a two-page photo spread, especially if you’re going for something really fancy and high class. You can do it with saddle stitching, especially if you can land it on the center page of the book, but it just doesn’t look good with these spreads. The margin for these books should run around 1.5″, but can go up to a 2″ inside margin. Talk to your printer to find out what he or she recommends.
The Benefits of Magalogs Over Catalogs
Why choose a magalog over an old-school catalog? Here’s why:
Higher Reader Retention Rate
Because a magalog’s content tends to be more editorial and therefore engaging, readers are more likely to hang on to it the way they would hang on to a magazine. You get a catalog in the mail, you might flip through it and then recycle it, right? But, you get a magazine in the mail that’s stuffed with informative articles and captivating content and you’re more inclined to keep it longer or even share it with others.
The more informative or useful the content, the more likely the reader will keep the magalog.
More Sales Opportunities
Because a magalog has more copy, there are more opportunities to creatively push and sell your products. That doesn’t mean every inch of text has to be dripping with advertising, just that you have more options for pushing your product than a tiny 3×2″ copy square next to its picture.
In other words, you can weave product mentions into your editorial content, highlight products in accompanying photos or discuss multiple products in one piece.
For example, I just picked up a point-of-sale magalog from a local winery. Sure, there’s an order form in the back and a listing of their products, but it’s so much more than a catalog. It’s full of articles about wine, meal pairings and even recipes and each of those content pieces is, in turn, stuffed with product mentions.
Quality Construction
Typically, catalogs are stapled together. It’s fast and it’s cheap. With a magalog, part of the appeal is in the design and the construction. That means using a bindery and high-quality binding equipment. For thicker magalogs, you could use glue or Unibind systems. Meanwhile, more compact magalogs can be bound using binding equipment like the Akiles DuoMac or with the fine finish of coil that the CoilMac provides.
Fewer Items, More Highlights
Magalogs tend to focus on in-depth copy and really delving into a product or topic. On the other hand, catalogs are exactly that – catalogs, compilations of records. They’re lists of your products with just the basics and could really be reduced down to little more than a table.
By focusing on fewer products in a magalog, you can highlight more selling points and really push sales on those key items.