What Is Commercial Printing and Which Method Fits Your Job

Commercial printing is the production of printed material for business use, at quantities and on equipment that no office can match. Brochures, postcards, catalogs, labels, packaging, banners, signage, letterhead, apparel and every piece of collateral your business hands to somebody sits inside it.

The part people miss is that it is a chain, not a machine. A job goes through prepress, where the file is preflighted and imposed onto a press sheet; through the press itself; then through finishing, where it is cut, folded, scored, drilled, laminated, bound or die cut. Most of the money and most of the delays live outside the press. A brochure that prints in twenty minutes can sit two days waiting for a folder.

Imposition is the reason commercial pricing looks strange at first. Small pieces are ganged, meaning several copies are laid out on one large sheet and cut apart afterward. If your piece happens to fit the sheet efficiently, the price per piece drops; if it wastes half a sheet, it does not. That is why an odd trim size sometimes costs more than a larger standard one, and why asking a printer which sizes gang well is a genuinely useful question. Most of what we run at 4OVER4.COM works this way, from greeting cards at $56.02 to full commercial real estate brochures at $57.11.

Most companies do not own this equipment and never should. A trade printer amortizes a press across thousands of customers, which is the whole argument behind outsourced printing services.

Offset carries a fixed cost before a single good sheet comes off: plates are imaged, the press is made ready, ink and water are balanced, and a stack of sheets is spoiled while the color comes up to the proof. That cost is the same whether you print 500 or 50,000, so it divides down to nothing on a long run and dominates a short one. Digital skips all of it and charges you close to the same amount for every sheet, forever.

Draw those two as lines and they cross. Below the crossing point, digital is cheaper. Above it, offset is, and the gap widens fast. What nobody can tell you in the abstract is where the crossing sits, because it moves with sheet size, how many pieces gang on a sheet, ink coverage, the number of colors and the stock.

So do this instead of guessing. Ask for the price at your quantity, then at double it. If the per piece price barely moves, you are being quoted digital and there is no reward for ordering more. If it falls sharply, you are on offset, and the extra thousand copies often costs less than you would expect, which is worth knowing before you commit to a quantity you will run out of in March.

The trade-off people regret is on the other side. Ordering long to hit an offset price and then reprinting anyway because a phone number changed is the most expensive mistake in commercial print, and it happens constantly. If any detail on the piece has a chance of changing inside six months, print short on digital and reprint. The per piece price is higher and the total is lower.

Color is the second trade-off. Offset can run a mixed Pantone ink that repeats exactly from job to job; digital builds the same color out of four process inks and gets close. Our guide to two color printing with Pantone or spot inks covers when that difference is worth paying for, and color and ink in commercial printing explains why the same ink looks different on coated and uncoated stock.

Half the back and forth in a print quote comes from a brief that left something out. Send these nine things in the first message and most printers can quote in one pass.

• Flat size and finished size. A brochure that is 11 by 17 inches flat and 8.5 by 11 folded is a different job from an 8.5 by 11 flat sheet, and the words alone will not tell a printer which you mean.
• Quantity, plus one alternate. Give your real number and a larger one. The comparison is what reveals which press you are on.
• Stock weight and finish. Text weight or cover weight, coated gloss, coated matte or uncoated. If you do not know, say what the piece has to survive.
• Printed sides and ink coverage. Four over four means full color both sides. A cover with a solid dark background behind it is a different job from one with white space.
• Spot colors, named. If a Pantone number has to be matched exactly, say so at quote time, not at proof time.
• Finishing. Folds and their type, scoring, drilling, lamination, die cutting, binding, numbering. Each one is a separate pass with its own schedule.
• Proof expectations. A PDF soft proof is free and fast. A printed proof on your actual stock costs money and time, and is the only thing that shows real color.
• In hands date. Not the ship date. Production time and transit time are two separate clocks and only one of them is under the printer's control.
• Ship to detail. One address or split shipments, residential or commercial, and whether a liftgate is needed for a pallet.

Then send a file that will actually pass preflight: press ready PDF at final size, 0.125 inch bleed on every trimmed edge, fonts embedded or outlined, images near 300 ppi at final size, CMYK unless a spot ink is specified, and critical text held back from the trim. The details are in our guide to creating commercial print ready files, and it is worth reading once, because the turnaround clock does not start until the file clears.