Print Production Technology, Then and Wow

In this episode, Jeff Chicquette, director of operations at DCG ONE, joins Whole Idea Podcast host Greg Oberst for a fascinating look at print production, then and now. Jeff and Greg cover a print production timeline that goes back more than 5,000 years. Jeff also offers his expertise on the cutting-edge technology and jaw-dropping capabilities of modern-day print production operations, such as DCG ONE.

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Transcript

Print Production Technology, Then and Wow 

Greg:  

The history of print goes back thousands of years. Hello, Mesopotamians, but to understand modern day print technology, you only really need to go across the hall and see Jeff. Hello and welcome everyone to the Whole Idea podcast by DCG one. I'm excited to welcome to this episode Jeff Chicquette, director of operations for DCG One West and a 35-year veteran of print production. Jeff, welcome to the, whole idea podcast.  

Jeff: 

Thank you, Greg.  

Greg:  

Good to be here. You're here to help us explore current print technology, but before we take that tour, I thought it might be fun to look into the Wayback machine first and just look at the history of print technology. If we see how far back and how antiquated it used to be, it might help us give us some perspective on modern-day look.  

Jeff:   

Yeah, so you mentioned Mesopotamia. The cylinder seal is often thought of as the beginning of the printing tool. The seal was literally a cylinder that you would carve something out of, so it had a negative impression in it, and they would roll it over clay, things of that nature to leave behind their seal.  

The wood block printing, which is probably the most real beginning of impression printing, was the opposite. They would take a block of wood, and they would carve away from the image. So you had what we would call a positive image coming out of the wood, and they would eat that. And then you take a piece of paper and stamp that into the, into the paper to get the image just for some perspective on when we're talking about the Mesopotamians, that's 3500 BC is, yeah, that's what I've been told anyway. I wasn't there. But then woodblock printing, we're talking, 7th century, so, you know, 1300 years ago. So that is a gigantic span in time… 

Greg: 

…not much changed between those two (times)...  

Jeff:  

And part of that, I'm sure was, the evolution of language. So one of the things that, also came out of China about 400 years later was the invention of movable type.  

Greg:  

That's starting to feel a little modern.  

Jeff: 

Yeah, same concept, but because Chinese images are quite intricate, it didn't get widely used.  

Greg: 

Interesting, OK.  

Jeff:  

Out of that era, what is often known as the first book was the diamond sutra using that technology… 

Greg:  

…printed on? 

Jeff:  

On a scroll of paper parchment, and to get it to be a continuous scroll was actually an art all in and of itself outside of the impression side of it. The next big step was 300-400 years later, and, and the one that many people are aware of, which is the Gutenberg. You would have a plate that you would put the lettering onto by hand into a matrix, and then you would roll you would take in a roller across that to put ink on it, and you would stamp a sheet of paper. They were hand placing the paper, hand cranking down the impression, locking it back, pulling the piece of paper away, placing the next one. But the Gutenberg, like that's commonly thought of as the beginning of the printing, you know, experience as we know it because what that did is.  

It led to the ability to create books on a somewhat massive scale, and it was a big part of it. It's always been considered to be a big part of the Renaissance…the ability for everyone to theoretically now have the access to learn and read and literacy became more than just something that the elite class had access to.  

The big step from there, not that many years later, with, if you think about it, was the linotype. So, the Gutenberg press, everyone's been placing their letters by hand for a few 100 years. The linotype is a fascinating machine in that it's basically this giant, typewriter, and it has all of the characters that you might possibly use…I want to say it was around 90. You hit that button and it drops that character down and it builds a line, and then it kicks it over, pours mol molten metal essentially onto it, and it creates a mold, and that mold then gets placed on the plate that does the printing, and so it's faster. You're not sitting there hand placing every single letter anymore and locking them into place. Now you're doing it line by line. And that made the ability to go from maybe an eight-page newspaper to all of a sudden, you can have a lot more going into your newspaper because you can crank out more copy for its day and… 

Greg:  

We’re talking about the 1800s here? 

Jeff:  

Right. And used into the 1900s as well.  

Greg:  

But the machinery involved in a linotype machine and the technology is fascinating and detailed.  

Jeff:  

Oh yeah. And the Linotype is really what opened the doors to speed and the ability to create more books faster. It became that next major step into the commercial printing that we see now. For a long time, the presses were just printing Bibles and texts, and then the small page newspaper that might have been you know, available to a few. The linotype, really was part of the newspaper boom…the concept of being an author and writing a book and making money off of it. All of those things are born out of the expediency of the lino type.  

Greg: 

Sounds transformational.  

Jeff: 

Oh yeah, and honestly that step from the Gutenberg to the linotype is the foundation of what our industry has become. We're constantly looking for how do we do this faster? How do we do this with less steps? How do we do this in a way that doesn't require hours of hand work? Where, where can we automate, right? That linotype automated something that had been done by hand for a long time, yep.  

 Greg: 

So, what was next?  

Jeff: 

Photo typesetting and is exactly what it sounds like. You would type something and then you would take a photograph of it, and then you would use that photograph on a negative to burn a printing plate.  

Greg: 

Now we're talking about what we're talking about 1940s? 

Jeff: 

Yeah, and that technology when I started in this industry in 1990. It was still widely in use. Digital printing had obviously begun before the 90s, so they were doing their copy on the computer, printing it, and then taking that to the photo room. Late 90s, we started getting into what we call direct to plate, and that's the proliferation now in the, in the offset litho web printing world is. All of the artwork is now done pretty much exclusively in Adobe Creative Suite. They will get the, the piece completely laid out, all your layers, all your fonts, everything's ready to go, and they just send that straight to the plate setter, and it spits out the plates directly from there.  

There's no in between anymore.  

Greg: 

Wow. Thank you for that history lesson there, Jeff. I want to spend the, the balance of this episode on what modern, large, high volume print production plant looks like and the incredible technology that's driving it today.  

Of course, there are more than just printers here, but let's start with that category printing first. Take me inside our digital press room and tell me about the presses that work there.  

Jeff: 

Yeah, you bet. So the digital press room for us ranges all the way from what we call a black and white laser all the way up to our newest editions, which are the large HP 15,000 indigo press or the large HP page wide roll fed digital press. We have a lot of quick turn print on demand client base work that we do on the black and white lasers. We keep 3 of those machines, most of the time. We also have a pile fed inkjet that does a lot of that work. That one can do what we call pleasing four color work. The toner-based printing is the oldest of the digital technologies, black on a white sheet of paper, and that's why we call it black and white. We also have color laser, same technology, except it drops 4 different colors of toner, and when it fuses, it mixes and it gives you what we call a pleasing color.  

The inkjet technology is literally a head that sprays the ink to where the computer's telling it to spray it. And our pile fed one, it's more of a small pattern, by that I mean letter size sheets generally. We've got a client that might need to get out a quick communication about a change in their offering or whatever, and to a targeted group of people, it can spray their logo on the sheet and do the letter, but it's not what we call one of our higher end, printing quality machines. For that, you would go over to our indigos, and we've got two indigo 7K pluses and one indigo 15,000.  

The Indigo 15,000 is what we call like a half size sheet, 20, essentially a 21 by 29. The 7K pluses are a 13 by 19, and they use a liquid ink technology, which mimics. The print, the litho printing world, and we'll get to that. We can do some amazing printing on those presses. The quality on those machines has pulled a lot of work away from the traditional litho printing over the years because it has the high quality, but it has the digital variability to it, which is one of the biggest reasons why variable or digital printing.  

It is a fast grower for us. And then the last one we have is that roll fed digital web, and that thing is an amazing piece for us. We've had it now for a couple of years. It can go fast, it can print beautifully, it can give you fully variable on every single sheet. It gives us the ability to give a volume and a quality and a variability all within one machine.  

Greg: 

Not only variable by, say, first name on a printed piece, but also by photo.  

Jeff:  

Yep. We have evolved to a pretty cool place with variable printing because variable printing did used to mean to people that they go grab a stack of letterhead and they're going to print the same letter for everybody, but put a different name, but it'll have a different name. We have the ability now through our data processing technology that we know stuff about every single person that's getting this piece of mail or whatever it is that we're sending. Sometimes it's in a kit, it's in a box. But we know some things about their preferences and what they like and what they want. And we use that information to say, well, this person, when they travel, they always have booked places that have a pool. So let's make sure that they get a pool picture.  

This person over here, they never have booked at a place that gets a pool, so don't put a pool picture there, but they like places that have sushi, so let's make sure we have a picture of sushi restaurants.  

We have The data, you know, we live in a world of data now and we have that ability to show the end user that like, hey, this offering here fits you and that's what variable printing has become, and it ties all of the skills that we have here at DCG one together.  

Greg:  

I noticed that we had a lot of digital printers down there, why do we need so many digital printers?  

Jeff:  

It's, you know, it's just, it's what people want.  

Greg: 

Our whole idea of podcast producer Kelsey Brewer handed me some data that she thought might be useful in this podcast. We averaged more than 17 million digital pages per month. Feels like a lot to me.  

Jeff:  

It is a lot.  

Greg: 

Jeff, across the street from our main production plant here, we have large format presses. What are those used for?  

Jeff: 

So we have 4 presses in the large format area now. So, we have a flatbed press over there, and that one can do up to 6 ft by 10 ft, and flatbed means you literally are laying the substrate flat on the table, has suction that holds it down. And then it has an inkjet head that moves across the sheet, spraying the ink, and we can do, we, we prefer to do like the thicker, more rigid materials on that table. We have a view tech that can do rigid material or rolls, and that machine is capable of doing two rolls at a time, which is pretty cool. We do a lot of two-sided printing in our signage world on that machine also.  

Again, it's inkjet technology. It's spraying the ink onto it. The two new additions was we bought two small Epson roll to roll printers, and we do a lot of banners and posters, and we bought those because they're great at knocking those posters out.  

Greg:  

We're talking about large signage on the sides of buildings.  

Jeff: 

We do, we do everything from a massive sign on the side of a building. To the in-window signage when you go to some of your favorite stores or restaurants. Sometimes it's as simple as just a rigid poster.  

Greg: 

Jeff, you know this, but DCG1 prints more than 1.65 million linear feet of large format printed materials annually. That's more than 314 miles of printed materials.  

Jeff:  

OK, I can see how that adds up because some of those banners are 10 ft tall.  

Greg:  

Yeah. Tell me about our standard offset presses. That's my language. I don't know if anything is standard around here…  

Jeff: 

Yeah, they may, they may not be standard compared to what was standard when I started in the industry, but they're becoming quite standard. We have 2, 40-inch Komori HUV presses in use here. The HUV stands for high efficiency UV, which means we lay down the ink. And then it goes through a station with a UV lamp that cures that ink. So the ink comes out dry, which is a somewhat newish technology within the last 20-30 years.  

And we've got two of those, one's a 6 color with a coding unit, one's an 8 color with a coding unit, and then it has the ability to do what we call perfecting.  

So can print 4 colors, cure, flip the sheet over, print 4 more colors, cure, coat, and put it out.  

Greg: 

Those offset presses are impressive machines to watch and observe the different color stations as they go through. You can look right on top of it and see the beautiful inks going in. And then at the end of the line, the operator taking a… 

Jeff:  

Yeah, the loop. 

Greg: 

The loop. And inspecting it like he's looking at a diamond.  

Jeff:  

Those presses are hands down, even though we can do great work anywhere in the building, those two presses do the most beautiful printing we do. What types of projects are common coming off the offset presses. We do covers for almost all of our high-end books, get printed on those presses. We do a lot of really nice travel books, and we'll do the entire book on those presses there. We can do a nice glossy, or if not glossy photo, quality poster. We do a fair amount of posters on those presses. We will do a whole lot of work for our clients that have full color, beautiful inserts, or we will do a lot of pieces for packaging on those presses.  

We have, the ability to print a box, top or do an insert for a box on those presses, and we do, we still do a fair amount of envelope printing, so we'll print flat. Kind of high-quality envelopes and then we'll send them over to our converting portion of the plant.  

Your favorite team, they might have a, a little calendar of games sitting on the counter. We do that kind of thing on there.  

Greg: 

Here's another stat.  

Our offset presses roll off some 26 million total printed pieces each month off the offset. A month. Jeff:  

Yep.  

Greg: 

Now, commercial web capabilities too.  

Jeff:  

Yes, and web means that the paper's on a roll. So they web up the press and they're literally running a continuous line of paper all the way through the press until it gets to the end. And one of two things happens at the end. It either folds it in line, which creates a bunch of efficiencies for us, or it will do what we call sheeting. And if we're sheeting, it just cuts it and stacks it right at the end. And then we can get that thing going up to 30,000 impressions an hour at top speed.  

Greg: 

What are some typical projects rolling off commercial web presses?  

Jeff:  

You go to your Sunday paper and it's got that big stack of ads in the middle of it. Well, a bunch of those might have been printed here. That's what we call an FSI… 

Greg: 

 …Free-standing insert.  

Jeff:  

Yep, books, book pages. We do so many stitched or perfect bound books at a decent quantity, and that machine's ability to deliver an already folded piece, it just creates so many efficiencies for our clients. We can take it straight to the binder from the press. That's a big one. And then we actually, again, I mentioned it on the litho presses. But even at like we do some very high quantity envelope runs where we'll print flats on that machine and then take them over to our converting lines. We at times will do envelope orders of millions at a time.  

Greg:  

Wow. Jeff, on the occasion that this writer is invited to a press check, color matching, say, for client logos or artwork, that's a big concern. How do we make sure that our presses deliver colors that are spot on and consistent from press to press.  

Jeff:  

Great question. So here at DCG1 and at many printing companies around the country, they're what we call G7 certified. We set what we call curves within the presses, whether it's digital or litho, web, whatever, so that we can get the dots that we lay down or the ink that we're spraying, if it's an inkjet.  

Or if it's an indigo, those liquid inks that we're using, we have a curve that we use to make sure that from press to press, we're getting the same color build reflected off of that sheet.  

And this is something that we have in-house, for people that are certified, and what we do is regularly same images, same sheet of paper, so it's consistent, and we run that make sure that we're getting fed back what we want, and if not, then we make some tweaks to our curves.  

Because what happens is any machine over time, you're going to have wear and tear, certain things aren't as tight as they once were, or whatever it is.  

Greg:  

So, they need calibrating… 

Jeff:  

That's exactly it. It's a calibration process to make sure that our client can look at what we call the Epson proof or color proof. And that our press is going to mimic that proof. So, if they sign off, they're happy with what that proof is showing them, we can take that to the press and mimic it.  

Greg:  

And of course for print, we're using the standard CMYK color model.  

Jeff:  

Yep, the G7 certification is based on CMYK color builds. The CMYK stands for 4 different inks cyan, magenta, yellow, and the K stands for black.  

Greg:  

OK, Jeff, once off the press, the printed material takes a right or left turn, depending on what type of project it is. Where does it go commonly next?  

Jeff:  

Yeah, the first stop is almost always the cutter. And that's because we generally are printing things what we say multiple up on the sheet, right? And we have in the building 5 straight knife or guillotine cutters. Some people like to call them flat table cutters. There's a lot of different names for them.  

Greg:  

After the cutting process, this is where that windmill, Heidelberg Windmill…  

Jeff:  

Yep. 

Greg: 

That's a fascinating piece of technology, given its age, what, 75 years old and still looks and works and operates beautifully.  

Jeff:  

Yeah, it's a very sturdy piece of iron, as we like to call it. The the windmill can do so many things. We can score, we can cut, we can put foil onto a sheet. We can emboss, we can deboss, sometimes we do all of those things. We do some gorgeous postcards for some of our clients that will have sometimes as many as 3 colors of foil just on one card and that machine is so good at what we call registration. You can lay down one line of foil, come back, lay down the next one, come back, lay down the next one, and you get this beautifully nested image.  

It's very exacting, it's not high speed, but You will see those things in operation all over the world still, but still widely used, which no one, no one has found a better way to do it.  

Greg: 

They haven't made them since 1950, so it looks like a museum piece sitting amongst this office modern technology around this. It’s eye-catching and fun to watch.  

Jeff:  

After that process, it might go to a folder, it might go to what we call a folder gluer.  

Now, a folder is literally what it sounds like. It just takes the paper from a flat state. To half fold, trifold, roll fold, double parallel fold, book folds, 16, 8, there's all kinds of different folds we can do. The folder glue, we can make a box, and we do it quite often, like a tray, a 4-corner box, a 6-corner box, a straight-line glue box, which is probably the most common thing that you get like. When I buy a toothpaste that comes in a box, that's generally a straight-line box.  

We've got in the building, the ability to stitch once stuff has been folded, stitching is literally putting staples or stitches into the spine of the book, or we can do a perfect bind, creating a soft or paperback book.  

Greg:  

Of course, there's one other capability on the floor that represents an important part of DCG one's long history, envelope conversion.  

Jeff:  

It's where this company started. It was a company that was taking printed sheets from other printers and turning them into envelopes.  

Greg:  

So you're talking about Barney McCallum. Barney McCallum, when he wasn't busy inventing pickleball, he was running a pretty successful business…  

Jeff:  

Yes, he was a man of many talents and my understanding, I have yet to have anyone say this isn't true. He also invented something called the unit one mailer, which we do here, but many places around the world also make it now.  

But what we do in that department is, again, you get a sheet of paper, you cut away the excess so that you have the flaps, the side flaps, the seal flap, the back flap.  

And the machine, as the paper travels through it, it pulls those flaps in, glues, seals, and then it runs a strip of remoistenable glue, which is the most common, or it might do a latex glue, or it might do what we call a clean stick or some people call it peel and seal, where you take that kind of plastic liner off, and then you can seal the envelope.  

Greg:  

Well, this is the process of envelope conversion.  

Jeff:  

Yep, right.  

Greg:  

After the conversion is done. Off to the mail shop is that next?  

Jeff:  

Yeah, so we have, we have a very extensive mailing, portion of the company here. We have inkjet lines and that is where it sprays the address or it might spray the address and an indicia, which is the postage call out, we have inserters, we have intelligent inserters, which means. We might come out of the digital room with multiple pieces of variable printing on them, and we'll print a little code on those sheets. So, for example, you get a piece of mail and there's 4 things that come out of the letter, and every single one of them says Greg on them. They're using what we call an intelligent inserter.  

We have tabbing capabilities, which is where you seal the outside of maybe a booklet or a folded mailer. We have the ability to apply live stamps, via the tabber, and then we do what we call a sort.  

And the sort is an incredibly important portion of the process because we do a lot of, I talked about data processing earlier, how that ties into the printing. Well, it also ties into giving our clients the most bang for their buck on the postage. We take advantage of our knowledge as a company and of the great people who work here to make sure that this is sorted in such a way. That it processes through the post office with the most efficiency for them, and then we get postal discounts because of it.  

Greg:  

And it goes right to the mail, goes straight to the mail from here?  

Jeff:  

We are what we call a certified mailer, so we can essentially skip a lot of steps that some people don't get to skip because we can verify the mail here in our building before it goes to them.  

Greg:  

More than 118 million envelopes converted a month here at DCG1, and more than 95 million total annual pieces mailed.  

Jeff: 

Yep.  

Greg:  

Pretty big shop.  

Jeff:  

There's a lot happening here. It’s pretty exciting.  

Greg:  

And in the case of DCG ONE, we're headquartered here in Seattle, but we have an entire East Coast production operation as well. Is it fair to say that our production room technology here is x 2 when you add Maryland?  

Jeff:  

Yeah, pretty close. They have added so much, not just in terms of the machinery as you and I have talked about machinery a lot, but they brought a lot of just knowledge, as a group that has allowed us to grow our overall offerings.  

Greg:  

Of course, there are other departments and divisions that serve production and the technology here at DCG one, logistics, fulfillment, pre-press.  

Jeff:  

When I first walked in the door at this company 10.5 years ago, already having 20+ years under my belt in the industry, I had never seen a place that literally could do it all, and we are very unique in terms of we can give our clients an end to end everything they need in a way I've never seen before in this industry.  

We can find a client who thinks that they only need a print on demand solution. And show them around the plant and see their jaw just hit the floor, and they're like, I didn't know you did that, I didn't know you did that, and all of a sudden, we found 3 or 4 more ways to take care of pain points for them. That they thought they were going to need 4 vendors for.  

We have clients who maybe thought all we did was make envelopes because that's what we were born out of all those many years ago and now we don't just make the envelope, we can print the letter, we can print the buck slip, we can print the brochure, we can insert those and mail them for you. We can make it targeted for you with our data. We can design it, and then we can give you the data telling you how the campaign ran.  

Greg:  

Yes.  

Jeff:  

I mean, holy smokes, I have seen sadly some of the places I've worked in the past no longer exist because they didn't take that leap into what does the marketplace want… sell, what the marketplace wants is everything, so let's give it to them.  

Greg: 

Jeff, I really enjoyed our tour around the print production floor, clearly one of our superpowers as a creative experience agency. Thanks very much for sharing your knowledge on this episode.  

Jeff:  

It's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.  

Greg:  

Here are my key takeaways.  

Modern day print shops integrate technology, lots of it to give marketers more options, greater agility, speed, and cost efficiencies.  

Print production technology goes beyond the presses with end to end software systems and services that start with technology and end with customer engagement.  

And data is the lifeblood of the modern-day print shop fueling targeted and personalized experiences, campaign optimization, not to mention ROI.  

My thanks again to Jeff Chicquette, director of operations for DCG One West. If you have questions for Jeff or want to talk further about DCG one's print shop capabilities, feel free to drop us a line at podcast@dcgone.com.  

Thank you very much for listening. Our whole idea of podcast producer is Kelsey Brewer. I'm Greg Oberst. Watch this channel for our next podcast and more expertise, insight and inspiration for Whole Idea Marketing.  

Take care.