Before anything else, preparation is the key to success. ~ Alexander Graham Bell
An order of 500 sheets of letterhead takes a ream of 500 sheets of paper, right?
Well, its not always that simple. When you are printing at home, its very easy to see that you put a piece of paper in, press print and then the printer spits out your finished product. Barring a jam or some other kind of malfunction the process always seems to just work smoothly. Of course with professional digital and offset machines the process is a bit more complicated.
In some ways, printing could be compared to cooking. Before you can start printing you of course need to have the recipe right, your design has to fit the intended media, be set up for production and be prepared to properly separate into printing plates. And then the presses, our ovens, have to be prepared as well. The plates have to be fitted and aligned to the press cylinders, the ink has to be prepped and inserted into the machine properly, and the paper has to prepared as well. Then, they all have to come together and work as one.
Throughout this process a pressman is making constant adjustments. Aligning the print cylinders, adjusting the amount of ink that is reaching the paper, and generally ensuring that the final product meets standard. But many of the necessary adjustments can’t be made without seeing how the ink and press interact with the paper. And so, where a chef might constantly taste to see how a recipe is progressing, a pressman needs make ready to visually “taste” a printed project and see what needs adjustment.
So what is Make Ready?
It is simply an extra amount of paper required for a printing project, used so that a pressman can make sure the job is running correctly. It is basically warmup or practice sheets that help the pressman ensure everything is ready for printing.
And how does this affect you and your print project? Depending on the type of job, a printer may be required to purchase extra paper to give a pressman sufficient make ready. So instead of simply purchasing one 500 sheet ream to match your letterhead order, a printer might need 550 sheets. Which means, that they will need to purchase 2 reams of paper to complete the job. This will necessarily depend on the paper being used, how a project is being printed and how the paper manufacturer sells the product. So every different printed material that goes on press will vary in its requirements.
Of course this means that the price of the paper is inevitably carried on to the customer, but there is a great deal of benefit that comes through having enough make ready for a job. Namely, it ensures that the project is printing properly, that the inks are printing in correct proportion and that the design is coming out as the designer intends. Skimping on make ready puts a project at risk of having issues that may lead to it having to be re-printed.
Make Ready is primarily an issue with traditional presses, but its not entirely absent in digital printing. On a digital press there will invariably be issues with color or brightness that will need to be addressed before the entire job is printed. Also remember that if you are having any kind of finishing done like binding, folding, scoring or what have you, then you will need even more make ready available to ensure that your finished project can be completed with the amount you need at top-notch quality.
We hope you are gaining a better understanding of various printing terms through our site. As always, if you have any questions, please ask in the comments below.
