Every year, hundreds of millions of Christmas cards are sent out to friends and family, but I bet nobody really thinks about how they are made. Corporate Christmas card printing is something we do each and every year for a wide range of clients.
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The first step in any greetings card creation starts with the design process. Artists and graphic designers will create their artwork digitally, and sometimes by hand to be later digitised, using graphic design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
We often see some incredible works of art from our customers, and with our own Greeting Card graphic design service in-house, we are regularly tasked with coming up with creative ideas for our clients. As Christmas is generally our busiest time of the year, our team has to work fast and always to our high standards to meet customer demands.
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The next step, particularly for customers that send us their own artwork is for our artwork team to meticulously check all of the details on the artwork, and to make sure the artwork is the correct size, has a 3mm bleed, key elements and text are within a safe margin on the Christmas card and that colour modes are correct.
All in, we run about 30 checks on every single piece of artwork we receive. A lot of this is done using automated software but some checks are still done manually to ensure the product we send to our customers will be absolutely perfect.
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As most of the custom printed Christmas cards we print are done in large batches, we use a printing process called lithography. We do get orders that are done in shorter runs and these are printed using a digital press.
If we are printing using the lithographic process, printing plates have to be made from sheets of aluminium. They will later be mounted onto large rollers on the printer to print the cards.
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Onto the Christmas card production, the paper is auto-fed into the printers and the cards are printed flat. Some of the lithographic printers we utilise can often reach speeds of up to 18,000 sheets per hour. Our highly skilled press operators make sure the sheets come out exactly as the designer intended utilising a host of tools and machinery around them to run checks such as colour matching checks and consistency throughout the print run.
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With a whole host of options on our printed Christmas cards, the process doesn’t stop with just the printing. A lot of our clients choose to add lamination to their print and we can even add higher-end finishes such as Custom Spot UV Business Cards, foiling, embossing and die-cutting of shapes. That’s right, you can even have a custom shaped Christmas card that’s completely unique to you.
The greeting cards are then folded and cut to the finished size. After getting a final quality check, they are then packed and sent to our customers all over the UK.
We find that short-run Christmas card jobs from our clients are a fantastic way to market your company. We send out custom printed Christmas cards to our clients every year as a thank you for working with us, often including an offer or two and have found this is a great way to communicate to people that you are still around to support them and that you appreciate their business.
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So go out there enjoy sending Christmas Cards and from us at the Apprintable team, we wish you a Merry Christmas.
If you have any queries or really enjoy this blog, we encourage you to write to us at hello@apprintable.com and let us know. We'd love to hear all of your Christmas stories, how creative your Christmas cards are and festive experiences on Christmas as we do love Christmas at Apprintable!
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