Pressision Print - Visit

This morning we went to visit Pressision, a printing company based just outside Leeds. We were shown around the facilities and it was explained to us how print has evolved with technology over the years, as well as how some of the more popular production methods work. The first thing the guy showing us around said was that it was only quite a small, family-run company, and given this I was very impressed/surprised with the size of their company and what they could do there, but this is probably an expression of my severe lack of knowledge on the print industry.

Above are the big CMYK rollers that produce a lot of their commercial printing. Images or files that they print are separated into the 4 colours, each of which has a plate produced, the plates are then printed on top of each other using their corresponding inks to produce a full-colour image.

Like I said earlier, I was surprised at the scale the company worked at, they even had folding and stepling machines, something that I imagine saves a massive amount of time producing things like books and information packs such as what they were producing in the photos. The speed at which the machines worked was ridiculous.

Amongst the other processes they did were foiling and embossing, as well as various different finishes of paper. At the end they showed us an experimental project they were working on, which involved changing the magenta ink to a lighter orange but following the same CMYK printing process, and how that gave the images a brighter feel to them.

All in all I enjoyed the visit and found it really eye-opening as an experience. It's really shown me the size of the print industry given that Pressision considers itself to only be a small company. The mind boggles at the potential size of bigger printing companies.