subject: How To Reduce Your Printing Costs [print this page] How To Reduce Your Printing Costs How To Reduce Your Printing Costs
There are a number of options to reduce your print expenses at home and for professional jobs. One obvious way is to find alternatives to printing, such as emailing and internet marketing. For the items that cannot be avoided, such as business cards, choosing the right printer is important.Become familiar with different printing processes and learn which are more economical and when. For example if you need to print bulk, that is more than a thousand units, litho printing would be the way to go and for smaller print runs, digital printing would probably be more suitable. Get quotes from multiple printing companies. Just because you used a printer in the past and they were cost effective, does not mean that they will be competitive for all sorts of print jobs. Printing costs can vary substantially from one printer to another depending on their focus or equipment.Commercial printing presses and machines can be pretty costly. Few printing companies would be able afford all the necessary equipment to compete across all niches. This means that there could be substantial price differences in the industry. An example of this could be with multi colour artwork where the number and type of colours play a significant role.You can save a lot by designing artwork to standard dimensions that do not require trimming. Working with the material that printing companies order in bulk is the most economical approach. Avoid bleeding and using high quality paper except where necessary.An interesting experiment was done to determine the most cost effective font. Century Gothic won. Below is a list of the most economical fonts.1. Century Gothic
2. EcoFont
3. Times Roman
4. Calibri
5. Verdana
6. Arial
7. Sans Serif
8. Trebuchet
9. Tahoma
10.Franklin Gothic MediumOften by asking the printers advise on cost reduction, something small can be changed in order to save a lot. Other factors to be aware of are the coating , whiteness and thickness of the paper being printed on.If you are printing at home there are a number of settings that you can change in your printer preferences. I always choose draft and greyscale mode as my default and then make the necessary changes as needed per print. Reduce the margin size of your page in order to use less paper, and there is even a shrink to fit option that will shrink your text to fit on the page.You can also select the specific page numbers that you want to print or highlight a section and print by selection. By selecting which pages to print, you can also print double sided by feeding the pages back into the printer. Lastly one of the biggest savings is to refill your own inkjet cartridges or purchasing one that has already been refilled.
