Tom Clark

Invisible in plain view

27 March 2012

Generally the inks used in litho printing are transparent. In the case of process colour (full colour) printing, this is because the four ink colours used (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, known as CMYK) are designed to sit on top of each other to create all possible other colours. For example, 100% magenta and 100% [...]

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Throw Outs

31 January 2012

Every so often, a client asks for a job to include what is known as “throw outs”. These are pages that fold out away from the foredge of a publication to create a spread that is wider than the rest of the job, and may themselves fold again to form multiple leaves. These can be [...]

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Don’t get into a (hinge) flap about perfect binding

29 November 2011

We must have printed hundreds of jobs that are finished as “perfect bound” books. This means the text sections are folded, and “milled” (to produce a rough edge that glue will adhere to on the spine edge); then they are gathered one on top of the other, and a cover with a spine is wrapped [...]

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You’ve got mail

4 October 2011

I recently had an unexpected absence from work (cycling accident whilst on holiday — don’t ask) and one of the things that occasionally crossed my mind from time to time as I recovered was ‘what on earth is my inbox going to be like when I finally get back to it?’ Fortunately, I am lucky [...]

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The fine art of publishing

5 July 2011

One of the things I most like about working at PrintHouse Corporation is the fact that a fairly sizeable proportion of the jobs we do are different in some ways to anything we have done before. This means that each job can pose us different questions – usually, but not always, in the technical sense [...]

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Book binding techniques

19 April 2011

We are often asked about the various methods of binding books. So I thought I’d just give a simple description of some of the different techniques here, plus a note on some issues arising from them. Saddle stitching This is a very common finishing method, which basically involves folding the text pages in sections so [...]

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Life cycles

15 February 2011

There has been a huge rise in the interest in cycling in the UK over recent years, which has not passed us by at PrintHouse Corporation. Quite a few of the staff cycle to work, and currently, over 25% of the workforce have taken advantage of the “cycle to work scheme”. This government backed initiative [...]

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Quite imposing

14 December 2010

If you are not experienced in buying or producing print, it can be quite bewildering when a set of printers’ proofs arrive on your desk.  You may think you have ordered a simple 16 page A4 brochure with a nice heavy cover so have a reasonable idea of what to expect from the proofs, but [...]

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Business rising?

5 October 2010

Have you noticed how much more busy everyone and everything seems to have become recently? There was one day a few weeks ago when, to me at least, everything appeared to switch up a gear;  things suddenly seemed different.  The roads on my journey to work were bumper to bumper; when I got here the [...]

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Colour management and ISO 12647 in printing

19 August 2010

There are no two ways about it – colour management is a complicated area. How do designers and those working in the graphics industry ensure that the results they get are what they are expecting, when they are, variously, viewing designs on screen; as proofs (which can produced in a number of ways); and as [...]

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