Finishing Report 2009
Welcome to PrintWeek's second annual Finishing Report.

A model, modern artisan
Bookbinding is a vanishing craft, but one man is determined to make it viable in today's world, finds Jon Severs

Mailing matters
Setting up your own mailing facility in-house should, on the face of it, give your print business a boost. Having a mailing line at your disposal gives you another service to sell, which might just help lift flagging margins. It would also bring everything under one roof, transforming a company into...

Lean and green downstream
If an unnecessary makeready sheet or wasted misprint in the press hall is tantamount to throwing a banknote in the bin, an unsellable finished sheet is like emptying the entire contents of your wallet into the trash. The economic and environmental rallying cry is 'resource efficiency', and it's coming...

Get print down to the letter
The added-value benefits of bringing the bindery in-house should be a well-known fact for the astute printer. So what's next? Entry-level inserting and mailing technology has never been so available and accessible, thanks to a bevy of new systems introduced at Drupa by established specialist suppliers...

Second coming
An automated perfect binder with a high-end signature recognition system, barely two years old and 30% less than its original value. It sounds too good to be true doesn't it? Well, at the time of writing, this tempting offer was being advertised on used machinery service website PressXchange, alongside...

Buyers learn to connect direct
Many buyers are oblivious to the advantages that simple embellishments can bring to a piece of print, thanks mainly to the fact that the majority of them will never deal directly with the finishers who put the final touches to their work.

How to crack the folding issue
Before the print industry moved inexorably towards digital methods of printing, the problem of spine cracking wasn’t so obvious. Because letterpress and offset inks penetrate the paper, any paper cracking that happened when a sheet was folded wasn’t very obvious. Although spines were observably fluffy,...

Finishing? It’s all in hand
Before machines, there were people. Until the 1950s, most UK printers’ finishing departments or binderies consisted not of folding machines, saddlestitching lines and gatherers, but of big wooden benches where staff would hand-collate, fold and insert. They would work their way through thousands of...

Finishing touches that grow profits
Printers are proving reluctant to outsource jobs for added-value options, due to price. But in doing so they may be missing out on key partnerships and profits.

Creative ways to attract attention
Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages on a daily basis delivered via numerous different media channels, which means that print has never had to work so hard to find a place for itself in the mix. While this presents challenges, it also creates an opportunity for print buyers to take advantage...

Dress to impress
Coating – the general process of adding a coat of clear or semi-opaque varnish to a printed sheet or web – has grown massively in the past decade.

Extended deliveries
It might have transformed the print industry, but technology hasn’t necessarily done print’s craft-rooted skill-set too many favours. Right first time, and on time production and delivery is now the norm, and in a predominantly buyers’ market there’s plenty of ‘me too’ capacity to provide it.