Visit to Printforms

On Friday with Jonathan, we both made a visit to his Dad's print company. Paul Chapman and some of the other guys showed us round and all the printers they use. It was really informative and a great help with the current print briefs. Paul even showed us how he estimates jobs and invoices them, because we can't actually print our work commercially for the good brief this will gave me an insight into how i should cost my job up.
I gathered a lot of examples of the types of work they print at Printforms and different paper stocks. Here are some photos ad videos of the printers. Oh yeh and the guillotine they use is awesome!

http://www.printforms.co.uk/

Old plates - the green ones - used to be used at print forms, they were metal, now they use a new plate that is plastic based (i think) anyway the image is burnt onto the plate using UV light, when described it reminded me of setting up a screen for screen print. Any way the plates are for each colour channel. The new plates are more efficient because they can be made straight from a computer. The plates are stored for a while after a job so a re-run can be done for a client if needed.





Lots of paper/stock, there were stacks of it all round the printers and i got some free samples, there were two nice samples of sticky backed stock i got one with a black cover on the back so if it was stuck to glass or a window light doesn't shine through it, the other was sticky backed but light could go through it. I think it would be good to experiment with this type of stock sometime.



Job done - storage



Jonathan upstairs in the storage part




Oldskool printer bought for £100











Four colour process printer





Videos i took: