In no particular order our three 20th anniversary competition winners are:

• Dawn Bontoft – Total Office

• Steve Taylor – Adare International

• Kate Morgan – Office Team

We will be in contact shortly to arrange your prizes.

Thank you to all who took part and we wish you a pleasant and happy New Year!

Best Regards

Print Evolved

As far back as ancient Egypt, the allure of gold and silver in print has caught the attention of our inner magpies, and it’s no different with consumers nowadays.

This appeal may not have changed, but the techniques for adding a little shine to design has adapted over time to meet the ever growing needs of our customers.

We have always offered high quality foiling, alongside embossing and debossing services. These processes involve the creation of a metal foiling die with a raised section in the shape of the desired image which would be mounted on a traditional letterpress printing press. Once set up the printed work would be fed into the machine, where gold foil would be pressed onto the print using the hot die, leaving a great impression of the foiled design on the printed piece.

The digital era has made the legend of Midas a reality, allowing any artwork to be brought to life with a touch of gold. Almost as if the technology has gone full circle, this new technique is similar to the way ancient Egyptians adorned gold leaf onto statues. With a little ingenuity we can now adhere gold foil to printed items using the adhesive properties of the ink itself.

With this technology we can now offer foiling much faster, for shorter print runs and even cater for personalisation jobs such as tickets, certificates and invitations cost effectively.

Features

• An extensive selection of foils ranging from traditional to coloured metallics
• Clear foiling to achieve spot UV effects at a fraction of the cost
• Holographic such as sparkle or carbon fibre
• Fully personalised

Contact your account manager for more details on our digital and traditional foiling service

Make your templates do the hard work so you don’t have to.

Below is a short guide on how to make the most out of your online templates and how to brief these in correctly.

Top Tips for building a template

• Drop Downs – if you have multiple data sets make sure you set your template up with a drop down to keep it clean and easy.
• Lock it down – If there is only one address needed on your product, lock it down. Less is best.
• Profile Data – If each location will be ordering for themselves then consider using profile data so products are automatically populated based on the user or group they belong to.

Key things to remember when briefing in a template,

• Always use the Template Wizard
• Provide all information upfront in as much detail as possible.
• Artwork needs to be high resolution PDFs with bleed and packaged with any fonts used.
• Artwork should show the maximum data length and all possible fields required.

Use your existing templates Smarter

An often overlooked aspect of Cognitu’s capabilities is address books, simplifying address entry within the delivery stage, saves time and improves the ordering experience. By just supplying a spreadsheet in the correct format to the template team we can upload this into your client setups on your behalf.

Use your order history! If you frequently need purchase order number reports, cost centre spends, usage reports etc. Cognitu’s downloadable order history can help. What’s more you can even tailor the information to your needs.