To start your printing, you need an idea. You need to turn your idea into a design and hire the help of a designer. A designer is generally creative and full of great ideas however they do not know how to set up a design to be print ready so you need the help of a prepress professional or a printer.
One you have your print ready artwork, you need a printer. Well, finding a printer that can produce your needs is another mind trap! Lithoprinter, gravure printer, large format printer, flexo printer, gravure printer, digital printer, screen printer, etc… Which one do you need??? In essence, all of them want your business and all of them will try to help you. Fact of the matter is, they will not necessarily be able to produce it, they will however know who can produce it and will charge you accordingly!
To assist designers, print buyers, printers, small businesses and corporate companies, some companies have developed online tools to help you with the vast amount of solutions there are on the market.
Listed below are a couple of solutions that have become increasingly popular:
Canva (For Consumers, print buyers) - Do away with your designer, have a play and choose from hundreds of thousands of templates that designers have created. You can use theirs and through an online designer, you can create your own masterpiece.
Shopify (For printers, print brokers, designers) – This wonderful little “online store” allows for people who want to sell print to choose for a bundle of product that they can remarket themselves. For example, you could sell business cards, posters, magazines, even shirts or shoes via an online store. Mind you, you still need to have your own production workflow and own finance package as well as your own supply chain, otherwise it simply does not work
W2P (For printers, print brokers, designers) – This is the “brain” of any print business. It receives information from your online store (i.e. shopify or similar) using the artwork you created (i.e. Canva or a designer) and sends it to the correct printer that has the capabilities.
Basically, if you are buying print, you do not have much of a choice, it is limited. You just have to find the right printer with the right technology!
In today’s world, everyone seems to be online… This is no different for print buyers using Google to buy their print. This transition from traditional “relationships” with printers to having a more “online relationship” is the trend associated with Social Media.
It is important to recognise the importance of relationships but also artisanal expertise. In the banner printing as well as printing industry, there is not one printer who can solemnly state that they can produce everything and anything under the one roof. The technology required to be able to achieve this would cost in excess of 100 million dollars and would require the footprint of a small town… Simply impossible! Had this been achieved, there would not be such a vast range of printers out there.
The expertise lays with the printer of choice for the job you require.
Unfortunately, printers are not IT Professionals and IT professionals are not Printers. Print buyers buy print but do not necessarily understand the value in the cost of print, just like printers do not understand the cost of running a successful retail outlet.
Because of such a wide mine field, MyPrintCloud and Bannerworld have developed an online technology which incorporates the smarts of Google, Shopify, Facebook, Canva, Microsoft and salesforce and spent 10 years developing a tool for both consumers, printers, print buyers and designers. A social media platform with collaborative tools to allow buyers to create artwork with no design skills, get the artwork print ready and send it on to the appropriate printer for the right price.
MyPrintCloud and bannerworld have create a creative workspace where people’s ideas, creativity and energy can be shared across users globally! MyPrintCloud is the first platfrom in the world that centralised workspaces and has the capacity to access, share and collaborate design, assets, print and ideas.
At Bannerworld, we are all about spending the right amount of energy on simplifying process and work so that we can all concentrate on the things that matter more in our busy lives. Dealing with a Printer of Choice should not only be about cost but collaboration, relationship, time reduction and efficiency!