The Lost Art of Imposition

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

is the title of a proposed session by Calverts' own Oz, as part of a Three Trees-Anna Gerber curated day at Greengaged, itself part of the London Design Festival in September.

The day's theme will be "new craft aesthetics in sustainable design, focusing on the relationship between the designer and our use of industrial processes, and it will involve lots of hands on creative thinking."

Imposition - the way we lay down pages on a larger printed sheet - is an apparently abstruse technique, and printers sometimes use the jargon to bamboozle their clients. We want to demystify imposition. Designers need to know about it, because along with a basic understanding of printing press formats, they can use the imposition knowhow to cut both the financial and the environental costs of paper and print.

A trade secret of designers 'in the know' is that they sometimes use a redundant area on a printer's sheet to piggyback their own jobs, effectively for nothing. Anyway, here's an example of a job we did a couple of days ago, with 40 business cards printing on a single SRA2 sheet from a single metallic colour plate. KX Stationery