Printing Methods in Nigeria

Desktop Printers – You can print your letterhead, invoices or even brochure through your own desktop printer, but beware, as it can be very costly if you are using a large number of letterheads or have an elaborate design with a great deal of ink coverage. Quality and finish can also be an issue so unless you are only printing a couple of letters or invoices a week it is easier to have your letterhead printed professionally. Once your letterheads have been printed professionally you can of course write on them or over print them as needed, however, in this instance you will be printing small amounts of text usually in black ink only.

Offset Lithography – It is far better to have your letterhead printed professionally by a professional letterhead printing company like Eloquent Touch Media. Most company letterheads and other business stationery are printed using a method called offset lithography (or litho print). Litho print for letterheads, compliment slips, business cards and marketing material generally uses a sheet-fed press, aluminium plates and printing ink. It is a fast, efficient, relatively cheap method of printing ideally suited to longer runs of 500 sheets or more. You will get consistent high quality print and clear sharp images. With litho print you can have either CMYK (full colour printing) or spot colour print (both explained below) depending on what is required. Nowadays CMYK print is by far the most popular and cost effective way of having your letterheads or business cards printed.

Digital Print – You can also have your letterhead, business cards, brochure, and flyers printed digitally, this method takes your file and produces it directly on to paper or card. If you only need to have a small quantity and need your printed material fairly quickly (i.e. next day or same day) it may be the method to use. It is of higher quality but very expensive. Another disadvantage is that Digital printing accepts only smaller weights in grm. So your business card will not be very thick.
CMYK or Spot Colour Printing:
CMYK Printing – CMYK or full colour printing uses translucent cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks in varying proportions to produce a complete range of colours. This means that your letterhead can have a full colour logo, heading and a background printed on it at the same time. In CMYK all the colours are broken down or separated into their different elements and then made into printing plates. On these printing plates the images are made up of tiny dots, this is called half-toning or screening. It allows for a tint or less than a solid colour to be printed and by varying the dots either by size, shape or spacing on the page a full colour image can be printed. The dots are too small to be seen by the naked eye but if you look at a printed picture (especially from a newspaper) under a magnifying glass you will be able to see how it is made up.

Spot Colour Printing – This method uses a different ink for each colour printed and produces brighter, more vivid colours but with a smaller colour range. The ink is mixed to a ‘recipe’ to match exactly to Pantone swatches or to existing print. If you need to produce a specific colour for a corporate logo for your letterhead this would be the method to use. The printing press has to be cleaned for each different colour and can be quite expensive if you have more than two or four colours. Spot colour printing would be typically used for jobs which require no full colour images or are in mono or duo-tone.