Perfect Your Printed Piece with a Protective Coating!

Press coatings, such as varnishes and aqueous coatings, are one of the best ways to “finish” your printed piece. They protect the surface while at the same time make it look better. Coatings add character, luster, and depth to a printed piece while being inexpensive to buy and easy to create.

Coatings come in several varieties: spot or flood and in different finishes: gloss or matte. A high-gloss flood coating is excellent for marketing materials such as brochures, posters, and postcards. Matte finishes are excellent for a more expensive, subdued sense of quality, such as financial, real estate or other upscale marketing pieces.

Spot varnishes bring out the quality of a photograph and give a piece a sense of elegance and art: they are excellent for high-end catalogues, educational brochures, and any marketing of photography products. Gloss finishes uniformly reflect light, making your piece shiny and smooth. Matte finishes lay down more roughly so that light is diffused.

Depending on the kind of coating, there are several methods for preparing your piece. However, all of these methods usually come down to this: ask us and we will take care of it. The following description is an explanation of the ways we prepare coatings.

Aqueous Coating

If we are doing an aqueous coating, we don’t need to do any preparation: we apply the coating and dry it as part of the printing process.

Flood Varnish

If we are applying a flood varnish, we will need to make plates that cover the flat surface of your printed piece, and we may run your piece back through the press after the ink has dried, which will take longer.

Spot Color Varnishes

Finally, spot color varnishes need us to prepare a plate in a similar fashion to spot color printing. We use your layout file and make solid areas of a color on every item you want varnished. We then output these plates just like any other, and again run the pieces through either inline, or after it has dried.

Any time you either want your piece to stand out, be protected or both, consider coating it. Please call use with your questions about press coatings.

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