My day visit to TEAM printers in leeds:

Each of these sections is a different colour of the process e.g. cyan..

As you can see a little better here: this printer only really does short runs.

Where the paper feeds into the machine.

All the different inks used:

This machine prints of one off runs mainly such as billboard runs and shop lighting displays

HP digital machine used for making business cards again not use for mass printing

inks inside printer: was told could use spot colours in the printer yet would be soo expensive to set up and clean wouldnt be worth while!

This is a bright filter sheet it seperates the cards or where one print job starts and ends- helpful for people who fold the cards or have to count the sheets in a book can easily see the seperation. all this is set up by the computer at the printers

pile of print jobs:

Spot varnish machine large screens.

People on the floor of the printers folding leaflets and magazines by hand. long hard job :-(

Foil blocking all done by a member off staff needs patience good hand eye coordination to be able to line up the block against art work.

the type here has just been foil blocked

die cutting machine again done by a man operating the machine a board is made with design lined up and punched as shown in the further images below:

A room full of the finished products an what they have created as a company all displayed appropratly:

this day at the printers was really useful to me as  it showed and became more real the whole process was from estimating the work to putting up on a calender which was FULL of different design work to be printed. to how each of the machines worked. i found the people who stood on the facctory floor folding all the magazines and boxes the most fascinating how some process are still hand done. the embossing and foiiing was a techical process and relyed on hand eye coordination i hought alot of pressure must go on the worker and the cost of the designs go up when they have to have people folding and applying finishes. the whole experience just shouted out this is getting serious! getting things right in my designs now becomes much more realistic big mistakes big money!