The next time you read your favorite magazine or go through the latest catalog that arrives in your mailbox, stop for a moment and think about how that publication came to be. First, writers, editors and designers participate in the creative process. Printers take that creative work and turn it into the publications you read every day. Printing is a fascinating process involving huge high-speed machines, 2,000-pound rolls of paper, computers, metal plates, rubber blankets and sharp knives.

Every print piece starts with the creative process. Writers, editors, graphic designers and artists are the initial step in the creation of magazines, newspapers, brochures, flyers, catalogs and other print pieces.

The creative team begins work in advance of each edition's publication date. Topics for articles are identified and writers are assigned. Strict guidelines for word length and a reliance on custom graphics keep articles short, informative and entertaining. Editors help focus copy and keep the whole process moving.

Once the text has been developed, graphics are created. Nearly every illustration is developed as original art exclusively for the magazine. Many "e-meetings" between the author, illustrator and director of design move the work from conceptual drawings to final art.

The Printing Process

There are nine main types of printing processes:

Offset lithography is the workhorse of printing. Almost every commercial printer does it. But the quality of the final product is often due to the guidance, expertise and equipment provided by the printer.

Offset lithography works on a very simple principle: ink and water don't mix. Images (words and art) are put on plates, which are dampened first by water, then ink. The ink adheres to the image area, the water to the non-image area. Then the image is transferred to a rubber blanket, and from the rubber blanket to paper. That's why the process is called "offset", the image does not go directly to the paper from the plates, as it does in gravure printing.

Step One: Pre-Press Production

Before the job can be printed, the document must be converted to film and "plates." In the case, film negatives are created from digital files. Images from the negatives are transferred to printing plates in much the same way as photographs are developed. A measured amount of light is allowed to pass through the film negatives to expose the printing plate. When the plates are exposed to light, a chemical reaction occurs that allows an ink-receptive coating to be activated. This results in the transfer of the image from the negative to the plate.

There are different materials for plates, including paper (which produces a lower-quality product). The best plate material is aluminum, which is more costly.

Each of the primary colors -- black, cyan (blue), magenta (red), and yellow -- has a separate plate. Even though you see many, many colors in the finished product, only these four colors are used (you'll also hear this called the four-color printing process -- it's a little like the three-color process used in television).

Step Two: The Press Run

The printing process used to print is called web offset lithography. The paper is fed through the press as one continuous stream pulled from rolls of paper. Each roll can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds (1 ton). The paper is cut to size after printing. Offset lithography can also be done with pre-cut paper in sheeted presses.

Web presses print at very high speeds and use very large sheets of paper. Press speeds can reach up to 50,000 impressions per hour. An impression is equal to one full press sheet (38 inches x 22 and three-fourths inches).

Well, thats a short intro about the process of Offset Printing.