Underprinting

Welcome to print.coop, the ink-on-paper pages from specialist printing and design co-operative, Calverts. We produce high quality, economical and sustainable, commercial print. We're experts in the latest and best litho and digital printing technology, as well as traditional craft applications. We know almost every commodity grade or 'designer' FSC® or recycled paper on the market, and can tell you about the most cost effective formats.

our approach

Why work with Calverts?

Print buyers come to Calverts for four main reasons - our creativity, quality, expert advice and track record in sustainable printing.

We have proper conversations with our clients, to help them realise their print ambitions - from fairtrade teaching tools and low carbon travel guides to art and science comics and high end books. There's almost no print idea we can't turn into reality.

We have a hard-earned reputation as 'green' printers. We're always investing, learning and sharing what we know about every aspect of low environmental impact communications.

And Calverts worker co-operative business model means we're able to improve continuously, by putting our money into state-of-the art repro and printing hardware, software and training - instead of paying dividends to outside owners and shareholders.

All this adds up to higher quality, higher impact print; timely delivery - and a better print experience.

Get in touch and we'll help you print something beautiful.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Standards & certification

Design and print affect the environment. Calverts has therefore implemented an environmental management system to the requirements of ISO 14001 to reduce our negative environmental impacts.

We are committed to comply with or exceed the requirements of environmental legislation and other environmental initiatives to which we subscribe. We are also committed to the prevention of pollution and continual improvement.

Our objectives are to:

1) Reduce our carbon emissions

2) Reduce the impact of paper use on natural resources

3) Improve resource efficiency and recycling

We have set up programmes to achieve this with targets and time scales.

Find out more about our environmental initiatives.

Print consulting

We are in the process of producing a brochure for a new client. It's the first time we've worked together and they are a little nervous. They’re investing time, energy, money and reputation to work with us and we want to ease their concerns.

Their main concern is achieving correct colour reproduction of a corporate colour onto coloured paper - namely a strong deep blue printed on a bright pink board. Now colour, or at least colour in print, is when light travels through ink, bounces off a substrate (paper, in this case) before being reflected back to the eye. Colour, like love, is often in the eye of the beholder, which is why all good designers and printers refer to a common colour language such as the Pantone colour system and often use densitometry or spectrophotometry to calculate the accuracy of a target colour. However, most (but not all) inks are transparent. Therefore the paper coating, texture and colour can dramatically influence how the ink colour is perceived.

Knowing this, consider that some inks are opaque and unaffected by the color of the paper. Opaque white is exactly that - an ink which does not reflect light - and we can use it to our advantage to accurately reproduce ink colour on a coloured paper. This is how it’s done:

The client’s corporate colour is printed in opaque white onto the bright pink board
To achieve an obliterating opacity the opaque white might be printed twice in one pass through the pass
The printed sheets are left to dry
Once dry, the sheets are fed through the press again, this time with the corporate colour overprinting the pre-printed opaque white
The sheets are left to dry again, before being made up into brochures and delivered to a happy client
Factor in the cost of a wet proof and you’ll understand why underprinting isn’t cheap but neither is it commonplace. The technique can be used to achieve some unique and intriguing design effects; a beach scene, for example, printed in black half-tones on a grey board underprinted with an area of opaque white might give the illusion of that area being bathed in sunlight. If you would like to bring some underprinting into your work, you know where we are.