Connections
Designing an Eco-Friendly Poster
Your customers are asking for green, your vendors are switching to eco-friendly practices and you’re starting to think about your own environmental impact. So, are you “green printing?” Are you using “green” paper, environmentally sustainable inks, and reducing your waste? Do you know where to begin?
I read a great article recently on Gather.com, How to Design an Eco-Friendly Poster, and the author, Anna Cruz, did a nice job of outlining tips to make any poster printing campaign just a little bit more “green.” That said, I still think she missed a few:
- Do shorter runs. In the Gather.com article, Cruz suggests consolidating your marketing campaigns, essentially cutting down on your poster printing by limiting the number of campaigns you run. I’d suggest that instead of running fewer campaigns just print smarter. With ultraviolet printing, you can do short, full color runs in the exact quantities you want. So, with planning, you can cut down on your printing and paper usage without having to cut your campaigns.
- Advertise your “green” printing practices. Cruz got it right on this one. She suggests putting a note or symbol on your posters letting people know you’re using recycled paper, greener inks or eco-friendly printing practices. Customers like to support a responsible organization, so let them know what you’re doing.
- Make your posters reusable. With ultraviolet printing, you can make your own green paper by creating posters that can be printed on again and again. UV inks can be applied to almost any surface, meaning you can print over the same piece of plywood or plastic again and again. Now, that’s what I call recycling.
- Go Double-sided. With offset printing, going double-sided is expensive because printers have to wait for ink to dry on both sides. With UV printing, it’s cheap, fast, simple and very cost-effective. Like Cruz points out in her Gather article, hanging your poster in a window gets you double the exposure without having to use two posters.
- Use green inks. If you’re going to implement “green” printing practices and buy “green” paper, you should also be using environmentally friendly inks. UV inks produce virtually no volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and are generally considered to be significantly more environmentally responsible than traditional chemical-based inks.
Low-Cost Event Posters
Here in Indianapolis, and I imagine in most communities in the U.S., we host a number of events, festivals and community gatherings. Every one of them advertises with posters. Some shell out the money for big, glossy, offset-printed posters, others opt for cheaper black and white posters. But, the smart ones print less and for less by ordering posters printed using ultraviolet printing on the Legend 72HUV wide format printer.
Why ultraviolet printing?
- You can do shorter runs. Unlike offset color printing where you have to print thousands of posters to make it worth your while, UV printing lets you do short runs for a lot less. This is great news for small festivals or neighborhood-specific events that don’t need 1,000 color posters.
- You can easily do venue or event-specific posters. Because of the run-size limitations of offset printing, most festivals opt for single, generic posters that try to cover every single event and happening. With the Legend 72HUV printer, you can afford to print color posters for each and every separate event and venue while still maintaining your festival brand identity.
- Go bigger (much bigger) and for cheaper. Ultraviolet printing has opened the door to affordable large-format printing. You don’t have to limit your event posters to 17 x 22. Now you can afford that massive, full-color banner or full wall wash.
- Multi-surface printing. Event posters don’t have to be printed on paper. Because ultraviolet printing can be done on almost any substrate or surface, you can print your event details on Gator boards, plywood, plastic sheeting and a wide range of other surfaces. This option is even more useful when it comes to signage at the event itself and because you can print over materials, you can reuse signs year after year.
Even if you’re not an event or festival in Central Indiana, there are still ways to find this technology in your area. Contact us at (877) 626-6848, and we’ll be happy to locate a ultraviolet printing-capable sign shop in your area.
Low-Cost Posters for Bands
You’re in a band, you have a gig almost every other week and you’re spending a fortune on posters. Or, you’re headed out on tour and you’re shipping out generic posters with a blank space at the bottom so the promoter can fill out the show information by hand…with a Sharpie…maybe…if she gets around to it. What’s wrong with this picture? Well, for one, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Wide format ultraviolet printing lets bands and musicians do short runs of massive, full color posters for a fraction of the cost of offset printing or silkscreening. Instead of photocopied, black and white, Office Depot specials, you can actually afford real posters that command attention with punch and color.
Traditionally, color posters were out of reach because you either had to shell out $2 for color copies (that look terrible) or order a run of thousands to even make it worth your while. And unless you’re independently wealthy, you’re not going to do that for each and every individual show.
Now, thanks to wide-format ultraviolet printing technology, color posters can be done cheaply, quickly and in small quantities. You need 20 posters for the gig in Spokane and 300 for the one in Brooklyn and you want them both to list the specific show information, including openers? No problem.
With ultraviolet printing, you can also do full color printing on almost any surface. You’re not just limited to paper posters. Bring your bass drum head in, we can print on it. Bring your guitar in (sans strings) and we can probably print on that too. Heck, bring the door to your jam space in, we can print on it! It also means you can do your posters on vinyl, plywood, Gator board, plastic sheeting and almost any other surface you can dream up.
Even if you’re not a band in Central Indiana, there are still ways to find this technology in your area. Contact us at (877) 626-6848, and we’ll be happy to locate a Legend 72HUV sign shop capable of doing ultraviolet printing and posters in your area. We can also ship to you
Low-Cost Posters for Theatre Troupes
Here in Indianapolis, we have a vibrant, thriving independent theatre community (so vibrant, in fact, that I spelled “theatre” the fancy way, with “re” at the end).
Each summer is the Indy Fringe Festival, an independent theatre festival, held just a couple miles from our office is Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave, as it’s known to the locals, has a cluster of independent theaters, and for 10 days, it’s overrun with theatre goers, buskers, and the actors themselves who visit each others’ shows and hang out at the bars and restaurants along 5-block district northeast of downtown Indy.
So what do theatre troupes have to do with a printing blog? A lot, actually.
As I travel up and down Mass Ave, there’s one theater — Theater on the Square — which has some of the best posters promoting their plays I’ve seen in town.
Sadly, I can’t walk anywhere without casting my printer’s eye on any printed material, so I’m always impressed by these posters. They’re bright, they’re colorful, they’re well-designed.
And they’re huge.
I would love to see more theaters (and theatres) use poster printing technology like TOTS uses. Most people have the mistaken belief that posters are expensive, or that you need to order thousands of posters to get a decent price break.
Not at all. Thanks to wide-format printing technology, like the Legend 72HUV UV curable ink jet printer. We have one of these in our shop, and I’m continually impressed by what it can do.
First, it prints to nearly any surface or substrate — we once printed to a full-size door, another time we printed to a 3′ x 6′ piece of 1/2″ plywood. Second, it’s like a giant inkjet printer (okay, it is a giant inkjet printer), which means it does full-color printing, including photos and funky poster designs. Third, it’s UV ink, which means it’s environmentally friendly and non-toxic. And fourth, you can print out short runs of full-color pages for a fraction of the cost of a traditional offset printer.
So what does that mean to theatre troupes?
Imagine printing giant posters promoting your play on vinyl, Gator board, or even a door. Imagine printing rehearsal photos, cast photos, and all kinds of great colors and backgrounds for your posters. Imagine printing only a few hundred full-color flyers on glossy paper, not several thousand.
Even if you’re not a theatre troupe in Central Indiana, there are still ways to find this technology in your area. Contact us at (877) 626-6848, and we’ll be happy to locate a Legend 72HUV sign shop in your area.
Photo: Kevin Burkett