Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Kopykat will close on Friday 21st December 2012 and re-open on 2nd January 2013. We would like to wish all our customers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Letterpress Printing- How times Change

Attached is a link to a video about letterpress printing this process was still widely used when I first entered the trade in the1970s my first job was letterpress printing how times have changed. The video link was supplied by our friends at the BPIF. vimeo.com/35688592

Lee Cooper - Devoted to Denim

We are pleased to have recently printed work for Lee Cooper a famous must have brand when I was growing up so it is good to see them still going strong and expanding with their slogan 'Devoted to Denim devoted to style'. They were founded in London's East End in 1908 by Morris Cooper and their products now sell in over 70 countries around the world. Long may they continue!

Roll Up Banners

We have just produced 6 roll up banners for a client the banners had a lot of ink coverage but the quality of the print remained consistent throughout. If you need roll up banners contact us for more information they can often be produced at short notice.

Visit Sushisamba Heron Tower London

I was invited to the opening night of Sushisamba Restaurant in the City of London last night. What a venue! situated at the top of the Heron Tower it has unrivalled views of London with outside terraces on the 38th floor that you can look in every direction. Last nights event was like a who's who of the fashion, music, TV, film and food industries. The hospitality from Sushisamba was 1st class and they kindly invited their local printer. Seriously though if you have an opportunity visit for that special occasion.

Email Marketing

Just been discussing email marketing has it reached saturation point? I find myself unsubscribing more and more and hitting the delete button. I believe that clients will come full circle and start to invest more of their marketing spend in traditional print which can be stunning and tactile and studied over a relaxing coffee. Of course email marketing, traditional print and social media all have a role to play in building up a companies profile but it will be interesting to see how it all develops.

Recycled Leaflets

Printed a nice selection of leaflets last week for a client who was exhibiting at the Trueman brewery in Brick Lane selling Fair Trade goods. We used a recycled stock called 9 lives offset in a mixture of leaflet and postcard weights.

Changes in Print

Been out and about today visiting clients both old and new and two of the older clients I visited first started using us back in 1987.This made me reflect on the changes that have taken place in print since then for example digital printing was unheard of and fax machines were the latest technological advance! the young guys that work for us nowadays see fax machines as antiquated bit like their boss most probably! What will the next 25 years bring technology wise?

Roll Up Banners £99 + vat

We have just produced a Roll Up Banner for Forest School in Snaresbrook, East London. We currently have a special offer on the banners at £99 + vat each. Ideally allow 2-3 days for production but if you have an urgent requirement we can often print them within 24 hours.

Cross Media 2012

Cross Media 2012 takes place at the Business Design Centre, Islington, London on the 3rd and 4th of September. The event is for marketers and agencies to discover how cross-platform campaigns can improve ROI. The event also helps traditional printers and media owners understand the commercial opportunities available to their businesses.

The venue has 6 seminar theatres, over 75 exhibitors and more than 100 inspirational speakers. Try and make the time to attend the event it should be worthwhile.

Shoreditch Festival

The Shoreditch Festival starts on Monday 4th June so we have decided to open Saturday 2nd June to accomodate any last minute print jobs that are needed. Printing will be carried out digitally for flyers and postcards. Opening times are 10am until 2pm.

Busy Week for Printing

We have had one of our busiest weeks in quite some time with lots of walk in work mostly printed digitally for clients while they wait. The type of work over the door ranges from PowerPoint documents to large format posters. We also printed PUR bound booklets for a local art gallery this takes slightly longer but we still produced 400 booklets within 3 days. We have seen an increase in traditional offset printed work we are presently printing a series of brochures for Google. Keep it coming!

Client References

A client sent an email to say:
"Thanks Darren – and thanks to Kopykat for their excellent support in an amazingly tight timescale.

I would like to say that Aaron did a spectacular job for us. Please thank him so much

The finished document has exceeded our expectations"

The above was for a booklet that designed and printed digitally within 2 days. 

When we checked to see if another brochure had reached its destination in Liverpool a client commented:

"Yes they did and they look fantastic. Have been pressed into service immediately. Bacon saved once again!"

The above was for 4000 20pp brochures printed within 3 days.

FSC Audit

Today we had a visit from the Forest Stewardship Council to check everything was in order with our recent annual audit, so basically our auditor was being audited. We are pleased to say that our auditor and Kopykat received a clean bill of health. What does it mean to you the client? It means we can use the FSC logo on your printed work when an FSC paper is chosen, showing your commitment to the environment. The journey of the  paper product can be shown from forest to the end user through 'Chain of Custody'.

Giants in Liverpool

Interesting weekend of street theatre going on in Liverpool related to the Titanic story. The street theatre has been put on by Royal De Luxe one of the leading street theatre companies in the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqqGhKl2Whk

Work Experience Student joins Kopykat

Emily Duncan a pupil at Ilford Ursuline School in Ilford has spent the last two weeks at Kopykat learning about the print industry, Emily has done really well and fortunately for us arrived at a particularly busy time so has been a real help in meeting many of the client deadlines we have had over the last couple of weeks, we would love her to stay but unfortunately she has to be back at school next week.

Well done Emily.

Architectural booklets

We have just printed a booklet digitally for an archictectural client that displayed the range of projects around the world that they had created and worked on, we printed 200 copies of 79 pages in full colour and used a PUR perfect bound finish, the client was delighted with the finished product and how quickly it was produced, this type of job can be produced relatively inexpensively nowadays as printing plates are not required and printing can commence often within hours.

Arrividerci Roma - The Eternal City

Visited Rome last week and forgot how fantastic it was, the last time I went was 1977 for the small matter of the European Cup final involving Liverpool FC, visited all the major sights and hardly any queues due to it being February, the weather was good as well, very spring like, if you do visit avoid the summer months when it is unbearably hot in the cities, we even found a really nice reasonably priced restaurant near the Trevi Fountain called Al Picchio http://www.ristorantealpicchio.it/index.php one of the best pizzas I've had for a while.

Large Format posters

Just about to close for the evening and a client needed six A2 large format posters for tomorrow morning, email has just arrived and we are on the case, we will print them on a high quality Epson printer which achieves photographic quality using a 200gsm silk and the client will pick them up by about 7.30pm tonight.

Boxing legend Barry McGuigan

We had a pleasant surprise today when boxing legend Barry McGuigan walked through the door, a really nice guy who told a great boxing story about the time when he knocked a fellow boxers gumshield out and it flew into the audience about 30 feet back never to be seen, until that is about 5 years later when he was signing autographs and a guy walked up to him and said remember this? he was the guy who caught it in the audience so Barry duly signed it. Barry pictured above with our very own Darren.

London Olympics 2012

We are expecting an increase in print orders relating to London 2012 from marketing departments and events companies that we deal with due to our proximity to the Olympic stadium, just for the record we are only 2 miles from the site of the games, we also have the added advantage that 5 of our staff drive to and from work passing the Olympic stadium every day so deliveries can be flexible.

Colour Poster Printing

We recently printed some colour posters for a client in the charitable sector at short notice they gave us a nice email reference:

  
Thank you very much for printing and delivering our urgent order. Everything is perfect and even better than we expected! As always KopyKat proved to be the best and the most reliable company!

We have had a relationship with this particular client since 1987 so it is rewarding to see that we are still meeting their needs 25 years on.

Twitter Facebook SEO

You can follow Kopykat on twitter @kopykatprint we mainly tweet about print with the odd football tweet about Liverpool Football Club being from Anfield I cannot resist it, you will also find us on facebook.com/kopykatprint, on our Facebook page we have tried to give some tips that might help you with your print jobs,  if you want to find out more about tweeting visit http://goo.gl/hFuln which gives some tips about what might work to build up followers, you will also find some good articles on search engine optimisation on the same link

Happy New Year

May we take this opportunity to wish all our clients a Happy New Year, lets hope the economy picks up duirng the Olympic year, it would be nice to think it will but I am sure there will be bumpy times ahead, at least we will have the olympics to take our minds off it, hopefully there will be a splurge of olympic printing related jobs to come in given that we are only 2 miles away. Stay positive!

Booklets

We thought we would outline some of the various finishes for booklet making.

Saddle stitching A method that binds one or more printed sections together it uses two wire staples (stitches) on the spine.

Perfect binding Generally Perfect binding is used when the document to be bound is too thick to saddle stitch it has a spine which is ground to give a key, hot melt adhesive is used to hold the pages together.

PUR Binding Very similar to perfect binding but the glue used is stronger than hot melt, the spine does not deteriorate with age.

Loop stitching is used for items that need to be put in a ring binder it can be done ith 2 wires or 4, the loops are on the spine of the printed booklet.

Wiro binding A series of holes are punched and a continuous wire is inserted into the holes on the binding edge, commonly used for handouts, price lists, training manuals and financial type reports.


Other finishes include comb binding mainly used for internal office documents, corner stitching normally a collated document with a staple in the top left hand corner, stab stitching which is often used on for NCR pads, Invoice pads and often hidden by a tape on the spine, finally for some documents you can actually use binding screws, holes would be drilled and the binding screws inserted this has the added advantage of being able to update a brochure quite easily by inserting or taking out a page, normally only suitable for smaller print runs.