MyWildIrishProse
Well-known member
By Richard Romano, Industry Analyst
If you have ever bought pre-perforated materials like the laser or inkjet business card sheets sold in Staples or OfficeMax, you’ve had the experience of trying to punch out the printed cards. It can take a bit of effort to get the cards out, they often lack smooth edges, and they can tear. All of this may be no big deal if you’re just doing some DIY business cards for a last-minute appointment or meeting, but if you’re using pre-perfed materials in any kind of production environment, they can be highly inefficient, taking time, producing waste, and possibly generating the need for remakes. Not that commercial printers would be using pre-perforated sheets for things like business cards, but specialty products such as boxes, door and bottle hangers, and other die-cut items often come on flat-sheet templates. They’re perforated so, like home-made business cards, they can ostensibly be snapped out of the sheet. However, when you’re dealing with things like boxes, which often have small tabs and intricate contours, these problems can be magnified exponentially. You have to detach them slowly, lest you rip off the tabs that actually hold the structure together. This can be a real production bottleneck.
A unique new approach to this problem was just launched by Minneapolis, Minn.’s Blanks/USA. Called Lift Offâ„¢, it is a range of substrates that use a patent-pending process to allow die-cut, pop-out shapes to be supplied in printable sheets without perforation. They detach quickly and without tearing.
The sheet is printed and, after printing, the backing is pulled off in a quick motion (facilitated by a release tab, so there is no digging your fingernail into a corner to get the backing off) and the die-cut shape can be popped out of the sheet quickly, without tearing or leaving any rough edges. Then, the item–say, a box–can be folded along the score lines, tab A is inserted into slot B, etc., and voilà . A printed box. According to the company, a dimensional product like a box can be completely assembled in as little as 16 seconds.
In addition to items like boxes (of varying sizes and configurations, such as small, pillow, tall, etc.), other Lift Offâ„¢ shapes include table tents, door hangers, bottle hangers, and more. Lift Offâ„¢ is available for such substrates as vellum, Invercote (a type of paperboard), cast-coated paper, and felt. It is compatible with offset presses as well as a wide variety of digital printing equipment–predominantly toner-based at present, including equipment from HP Indigo, Canon, Kodak, Konica Minolta, and Xerox. It can be used in office printers as well. The Blanks/USA Online Studio and free downloadable templates make it easy to get the images where they need to go.
The Lift Offâ„¢ material’s compatibility with digital equipment means that these types of specialty materials can be printed in long or short runs, and extensively customized or personalized. There is no minimum quantity, so printers seeking to use Lift Offâ„¢–or any Blanks/USA product–can only buy what they need for a given job or project.
Dimensional items (or, I should say, three-dimensional items; even the beings in Flatland have dimension, albeit just one) not only make great promotional gifts for events, but the fact that a box can have up to six surfaces–compared to a flat print that has at most two–that’s three times as many opportunities to add a promotional or sponsorship message.
“There’s nothing else on the market like it–allowing you to digitally produce dimensional or die cut substrates,” said Blanks/USA Chief Executive Officer Andy Ogren, “now printers can offer best in class quality with ease and profitability.”
I have written often–here and elsewhere–about the growing importance of these kinds of “high-value” print applications to print providers. When we think about technology enabling these kinds of items, we often think of heavy-duty printing equipment and complex software. But sometimes “technology” can take the form of seemingly “low-tech” solutions to common problems.
For more information, visit www.blanksusa.com/liftoff.
If you have ever bought pre-perforated materials like the laser or inkjet business card sheets sold in Staples or OfficeMax, you’ve had the experience of trying to punch out the printed cards. It can take a bit of effort to get the cards out, they often lack smooth edges, and they can tear. All of this may be no big deal if you’re just doing some DIY business cards for a last-minute appointment or meeting, but if you’re using pre-perfed materials in any kind of production environment, they can be highly inefficient, taking time, producing waste, and possibly generating the need for remakes. Not that commercial printers would be using pre-perforated sheets for things like business cards, but specialty products such as boxes, door and bottle hangers, and other die-cut items often come on flat-sheet templates. They’re perforated so, like home-made business cards, they can ostensibly be snapped out of the sheet. However, when you’re dealing with things like boxes, which often have small tabs and intricate contours, these problems can be magnified exponentially. You have to detach them slowly, lest you rip off the tabs that actually hold the structure together. This can be a real production bottleneck.
A unique new approach to this problem was just launched by Minneapolis, Minn.’s Blanks/USA. Called Lift Offâ„¢, it is a range of substrates that use a patent-pending process to allow die-cut, pop-out shapes to be supplied in printable sheets without perforation. They detach quickly and without tearing.
The sheet is printed and, after printing, the backing is pulled off in a quick motion (facilitated by a release tab, so there is no digging your fingernail into a corner to get the backing off) and the die-cut shape can be popped out of the sheet quickly, without tearing or leaving any rough edges. Then, the item–say, a box–can be folded along the score lines, tab A is inserted into slot B, etc., and voilà . A printed box. According to the company, a dimensional product like a box can be completely assembled in as little as 16 seconds.
In addition to items like boxes (of varying sizes and configurations, such as small, pillow, tall, etc.), other Lift Offâ„¢ shapes include table tents, door hangers, bottle hangers, and more. Lift Offâ„¢ is available for such substrates as vellum, Invercote (a type of paperboard), cast-coated paper, and felt. It is compatible with offset presses as well as a wide variety of digital printing equipment–predominantly toner-based at present, including equipment from HP Indigo, Canon, Kodak, Konica Minolta, and Xerox. It can be used in office printers as well. The Blanks/USA Online Studio and free downloadable templates make it easy to get the images where they need to go.
The Lift Offâ„¢ material’s compatibility with digital equipment means that these types of specialty materials can be printed in long or short runs, and extensively customized or personalized. There is no minimum quantity, so printers seeking to use Lift Offâ„¢–or any Blanks/USA product–can only buy what they need for a given job or project.
Dimensional items (or, I should say, three-dimensional items; even the beings in Flatland have dimension, albeit just one) not only make great promotional gifts for events, but the fact that a box can have up to six surfaces–compared to a flat print that has at most two–that’s three times as many opportunities to add a promotional or sponsorship message.
“There’s nothing else on the market like it–allowing you to digitally produce dimensional or die cut substrates,” said Blanks/USA Chief Executive Officer Andy Ogren, “now printers can offer best in class quality with ease and profitability.”
I have written often–here and elsewhere–about the growing importance of these kinds of “high-value” print applications to print providers. When we think about technology enabling these kinds of items, we often think of heavy-duty printing equipment and complex software. But sometimes “technology” can take the form of seemingly “low-tech” solutions to common problems.
For more information, visit www.blanksusa.com/liftoff.
