OnFulfillment Blog | Commercial Print (2)

Please tell us your Education Services organization isn’t wasting time shopping for commercial printers every time they need to print courseware. That practice went out with the Rolodex.

The last thing your training team needs is to stress about producing courseware. These critical printed pieces must be produced and delivered efficiently, customized as needed, and free of mistakes.

The solution lies within your courseware web portal – as long as it offers print-on-demand (POD) functionality.

“Do you want to print your brochure in 4 color?”  “No, I want to use all the colors.”

This exchange between a print expert and a tech company CEO took place a few years ago. It points out that what may be a common term for a printer isn’t necessarily common to a customer.

If you’ve worked with commercial printers, you know that sometimes they start speaking a whole different language. We feel your pain!

Chances are, you don’t have time to invest in a copy of the Pocket Pal, produced by International Paper and generally regarded as the “industry Bible” of graphic arts terminology. You don’t really need to. A few printing 101 lessons will bring you up to speed in no time.

To help marketers everywhere, we’ve put together a handy list of printing terms that have one nifty thing in common – they’re all acronyms!  Enjoy this alphabet soup of printing terms!

When people talk about printing, they usually focus on the front end of the process – the design, the size, the format, the colors (like 4C and PMS colors), the paper, and the printing itself – digital, offset, and screen, to name just three.

But let’s not forget the “back end” of the process – the stuff that happens to a print job after it comes off the press.

Post-press operations are a combination of binding and finishing.