How To Reduce Your Printing Costs
Businesses spend a lot of money on their marketing material and the printing of invoices and documents. Things like business cards may not be possible to avoid, but with the usability of the internet, a lot of business and advertising can be done online. Invoices can be emailed and documents can be read and stored on your computer.
Become familiar with different printing processes and learn which are more economical and when. For example if you need to print bulk, that is more than a thousand units, litho printing would be the way to go and for smaller print runs, digital printing would probably be more suitable. Get quotes from multiple printing companies. Just because you used a printer in the past and they were cost effective, does not mean that they will be competitive for all sorts of print jobs. Printing costs can vary substantially from one printer to another depending on their focus or equipment.
There are often significant price differences when it comes to colour printing. As an example, a printer that's cheap on a four colour flyer could be incredibly costly with a two colour flyer. This happens because each printing company has differing types of printing presses that target certain niches. Few printers would be in a position to afford the variety of equipment necessary to compete across the board.
You can save a lot by designing artwork to standard dimensions that do not require trimming. Working with the material that printing companies order in bulk is the most economical approach. Avoid bleeding and using high quality paper except where necessary.
Research has gone into discovering the font that uses the least ink. Century Gothic came out tops. Here is a list of the 10 most economical fonts:
1. Century Gothic 2. EcoFont 3. Times Roman 4. Calibri 5. Verdana 6. Arial 7. Sans Serif 8. Trebuchet 9. Tahoma 10.Franklin Gothic Medium
The types of paper that you can use influence cost depending on the weight, whiteness, colour and coating. Ask your printer for advice in choosing something that fits your requirements and pocket. Small changes can make a big differences.
If you are printing at home there are a number of settings that you can change in your printer preferences. I always choose draft and greyscale mode as my default and then make the necessary changes as needed per print. Reduce the margin size of your page in order to use less paper, and there is even a shrink to fit option that will shrink your text to fit on the page.
It is not always necessary to print a whole document or whole page when only a paragraph or section is needed. In the printer options it is possible to print by selection and even choose which pages to print in a document. If your printer does not do double sided prints then by selecting every second page for example you can re-feed the pages back into the printer and do another run, this time selecting the pages that were skipped. Finally, use refilled cartridges or refill your own. Refill kits are widely available and can save you to 70% of the price of a new cartridge.
About the Author
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Deepdesign specialises in logo design, packaging, branding and printing of marketing material. We offer rediculous prices on business cards. http://www.deepdesign.co.za
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