Printing Processes

There are various methods of printing Labels such as:

Flexo printing on a colour rotary printing machine, this type of machine is used with large runs of labels and has the capacity of producing thousands of high quality definition labels per hour. Flexo printing offers versatile photographic reproduction by blending cyan, magenta, yellow & black (CMYK) inks to provide virtually exact colour reproduction. If required special Pantone matching colours can be added where corporate colour matching has been used in the design.

Digital Printing is a modern method of printing, it is fast, instant drying and sharp, and this type of printing is mainly used for short-run usage and mainly on flat sheets although there are some machines that will print on rolls. This type of printing is mainly used where deadlines are tight. Digital printing can be transferred onto a variety of substrates such as paper, card, vinyl, plastic, transparencies etc.

Pantone Colour Matching System provides swatch booklets showing colour variations and shades, these are shown in solid colours on one side of the page and the equivalent matching shade made up of CMYK percentage combinations on the other side. Each colour and shade is numbered and books can be compared internationally showing identical colour matches.

Silk Screen printing is produced on machines using a porous fabric screen with the positive graphics & text areas removed. The ink is pressed through the screen with a squeegee onto the product to be printed on which can be glass, board, fabric, metal, acrylic, timber and most other surface types. This method uses the CMYK method of colour-dot-blending to make up the required colour shade and ink strengths.

Die-line Cutting of special label shapes is an automatic process during the print process allowing interesting and unusual graphics to be produced giving your products an attractive appearance.

Rolls or flat sheet production, labels can be printed on rolls for use with automatic labelling machines or just for ease of storage. Large labels are printed on flat sheets as they are too big to be run on the rotary presses. 250mm x 350mm is about the maximum size label to be printed on rolls.

Core sizes for labels on rolls 25.4mm, 40mm, 76.2mm. Medium and large labels require increased core sizes.