Anyone who has ever worked with commercial printers could tell you horror stories of press mistakes that cost tens of thousands of dollars in reprints and sometimes a person’s job, and the world of packaging printing is certainly no exception.
Client side design teams work with the best of intentions, but often have a false sense of security about their level of commercial Flexo printing knowledge – which can be even more nuanced in the world of packaging printing. More than just digital pantones, dielines, safe space, and line screen, packaging printing is a complex business with true mastery achieved by specialized packaging prepress teams and operators.
A deep understanding of films (materials), lacquers and color as well as how all these elements interact with one another is just one advantage of working with a packaging prepress team. The biggest advantage though comes with having access to a team that lives and breathes Flexo printing. They are there to ask questions, make suggestions, correct mistakes, and spot problems before it’s too late.
Keep reading to explore 3 ways that experienced prepress teams can offer peace-of-mind to brands making significant investments in their packaging strategies.
What is Prepress
To understand just how valuable a prepress team can be to a packaged goods brand, first it helps to define what they do. Generally, prepress consists of the team needed to prepare and translate a clients designs into Flexo friendly formats so that the final printed packaging meets specifications. This also involves managing, proofing and approval processes. In order to support press operations, prepress involves both creative and technical knowledge.
Prepress responsibilities, and structures can differ greatly with some printers having their own teams to support clients, while others outsource prepress to third parties. Regardless of the model, prepress teams exist to provide a critical translation layer between a client’s expectations and the final printed packaging.
Just as some prepress teams can vary in responsibilities and scale, so can clients’ needs for their services. For established consumer goods brands, packaging design is familiar, and likely baked into their creative experience and as such they may have less need for creative services, and more for pre-production. While on the flip side new or growing consumer brands could benefit more from early creative support until experience is built up.
Advantage 1: Creative Support
For new or growing consumer brands, coming up with effective creative for packaging design is not something the average in-house designer should be given carte-blanche to develop. Doing so puts a lot of trust in someone who likely has broad experience across multiple mediums but not specifically packaging.
Design tasks such as concept development, structural planning, production art prep, and having access to templated guidelines are just a few creative services that some prepress teams will offer. Being able to rely on the suggestions and oversight of a team that has seen and supported how other brands design effective packaging is invaluable
When working with a prepress team on any creative work, it’s important to know the boundaries for what they are responsible for or what they support. Ultimately they are there to help with best practices, suggestions, and guidance but the client or their agency are the product and the branding experts.
Advantage 2: Pre-Production Experience
Another advantage that anyone working with a prepress team will have access to is pre-production support. Pre-production support involves more of the technical or process driven aspects of prepress such as proofing, plating, quality control, color management, packaging engineering, press scheduling and other non-creative tasks.
Although pre-production is required for anyone working with commercial printers due to the highly specialized nature of operating complex presses, an experienced prepress team can help with surfacing issues during pre-production before they become problems.
For example a design change a client views as ‘quick’ could cause ripple effects with how quickly new plates could be made impacting the press and delivery schedules. An experienced prepress team would have an understanding of the plating time, cost, and scheduling to help make informed decisions. Or for example a prepress team may know from experience how a particular color looks on a given material and be able to raise the issue early in the pre-production process.
Advantage 3: Quality Control
A critical role that prepress teams own during any packaging job is the responsibility for quality control. Quality control spans many parts of a press operation but for prespress it requires coordinating with the client, plate making and operators to ensure alignment between expectations, specifications, and the final printed packaging.
To manage quality control many prepress teams utilize specialized proofing software to ensure a record of changes and approvals between the clients final sign off and plate making. This allows prepress teams to review proof version history and ensure that the approved proofs are what make it to press.
Beyond managing quality control throughout the proofing stages with the client, prepress teams also look for other issues that can go unnoticed by the client or are elements that are added after sign off to support the press operation. This can include checking for barcodes readability, color differences, image alignments, printers marks, missing text, multilingual needs, and material defects among many other items in a long checklist. Again specialized software is often used to help detect these problems versus risking human error.
Your sustainable packaging partner
For brand marketers, having a packaging partner with an experienced prepress team can be the difference between costly redo’s and getting your packaging right the first time. For new or growing brands, prepress teams offer that extra layer of support and guidance when navigating packaging design for the first time or building up experience.
At AlphaPoly we offer our clients a reliable partnership for their packaging solutions that draws on more than 30 years of industry experience and knowledge. We pride ourselves on being nimble and responsive to our clients needs and we offer a wide variety of traditional and sustainable packaging options that are tailor made for our clients industries.
Find out how AlphaPoly can elevate your brand today, contact us to learn more.
