A nice overview of how a commercial printing process works for quality commercial printing by commercial printing presses. Progressive Printing, in Springfield, VA shows us in this educational YouTube video how they estimate, receive, prep (Preflight) and output customer print-files for commercial printing of offset lithography. Great watching for graphic designers, digital layout artists, marketing departments for the commercial printing market or anyone that purchases full color print jobs for color commercial printing lithographic work really:

This is a Komori printing press they use, btw. 5,000 to 11,000 impressions per hour!  Also impressive is Markzware’s commercial printing software products for preflight, data conversion, and more.

With a title like, “Print Isn’t Dead” makes it hard not to click on, especially for people from the printing trade. Here we read in Forbes about how the ancient craft of letterpress printing is making a comeback:

“Letterpress is a method of printing text and images by laying paper onto a raised surface that has been inked and applying considerable pressure. Its roots go back to 2nd-century Chinese woodblock printing, through 15th-century movable type and on into the rotary presses of the mid-19th century.

A decade ago you could pick up a discarded press for a few hundred bucks. David Jury, a 60-year-old typography expert and author in Colchester, England, bought one in 1996 and began printing his own books and stationery, helping to kick off a minirevival of letterpress artifacts that now include embossed wedding invitations, calendars, limited-edition prints and one-of-a-kind objets. Take that, paperless society.”
Source: http://www.forbes.com/global/2009/0608/hatch-show-print-letterpress-revisted.html

The article highlights how having a small press and print-shop operation is making a come-back in NYC and across the States really. The quality and feel is better than commercial printing.  And they continue with this little bit;  Read more... (353 words, estimated 1:25 mins reading time)

Here is an interesting piece from Dr. Joe of WhatTheyThink.com titled, “June 10 Economic Webinar Q&A.” This bit on the average number of employees at a printer and it’s potential relation to graphic designers taking on more of the role of prepress is what I wanted us to zoom in on here:

Q.  Is the average size of successful printing companies increasing or decreasing? Sales volume and or employee count as a measure.

A. Sales are down and our industry has a habit of calibrating itself by adding or shedding businesses as needed. The inflation-adjusted sales per employee is actually remarkably steady, which indicates this. The average size of a commercial printing business has been on a very slow decline for decades. It was around 26 employees in the late 1980s and was just above 19 by 2006. That says more about desktop publishing replacing prepress than it says about anything else.
Source: http://members.whattheythink.com/home/drjoe269.cfm  Read more... (460 words, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)

Updated with formatted table of Twitter Listing:

Printers who Twitter (version 2)
Prepress, print-shops and industry associations or professionals in print media who are active on Twitter.com
(Want it as a formatted Excel sheet? Tweet us; or comment below..)

Based on popular demand, we have expanded this list of print-type people on Twitter with those that RT (Re-Tweet), DM  (Direct Message) on Twitter or commented on our blog. We can always do a v3, so let us know if you are a graphic layout printer or prepress professional and not on this list!

NEW ENTRIES:
(Added locations, as requested by some.)
PRINTERS, PREPRESS – shops and individuals:  Read more... (1366 words, estimated 5:28 mins reading time)

Dave Matthews heads up the prepress department at Progressive Printing, a Martinsburg, WV commercial printing facility. Long plagued by Microsoft Publisher files submitted by a typical (in the commercial art print poster world) customer base that’s ill-equipped and uneducated in the process of preparing digital content for print, Matthews discovered Markzware’s PUB2ID plug-in.  It should be noted that this plug-in also works for printable greeting card, printable business cards, printing posters, printable greeting cards, print postcard printing jobs, etc.
Markzware (the originators of FlightCheck) followed up with Matthews some months later to find out how the application had helped solve some of the conversion problems he’d been facing when dealing with Microsoft Publisher files regarding print art poster and art poster printing, and he was gracious to share his thoughts:

Markzware: When was the company founded?

Matthews: 1995.

Markzware: Is Progressive Printing’s clientele mostly local to the Martinsburg area? Or does your client base extend beyond the local market?

Matthews: About 60% of our clients are in the Martinsburg area. The other 40% is all over the US.  Read more... (787 words, estimated 3:09 mins reading time)